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WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN 
HOLLAND 



CHILDREN OF OTHER LANDS BOOKS 

Independent Volumes With Characteristic Illus- 
trations and Cover Designs i2mo Cloth 
Price of each Volume, net, 75 cts. 

There are many books about the children of other coun- 
tries, but no other group like this, with each volume written 
by one who has lived the foreign child life described, and 
learned from subsequent experience in this country how to 
tell it in a way attractive to American children — and in fact 
to Americans of any age. 

WHEN I WAS A BOY IN CHINA 

By Yan Phou Lee 

WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN ITALY 

By Marietta Ambrosi 

WHEN I WAS A BOY IN JAPAN 

By Sakae Shioya 

WHEN I WAS A BOY IN GREECE 

By George Demetrios 

WHEN I WAS A BOY IN PALESTINE 

By Mousa J. Kaleel 

WHEN I WAS A BOY IN BELGIUM 

By Robert Jonckheere 

WHEN I WAS A BOY IN RUSSIA 

By Vladimir De Bogory Mokrievitch 

WHEN I WAS A BOY IN ROUMANIA 

By Dr. J. S. Van Teslaar 

WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

By Cornelia De Groot 

LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO. 
BOSTON 



WHEN I WAS A GIRL 
IN HOLLAND 



BY 



CORNELIA DE GROOT 



ILL US TRA TED FR OM PHO TO GRAPHS 




BOSTON 

LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO. 



Published, August, 19 17 



^ 
£■»» 



Copyright, 191 7, 
By Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co. 



All Rights Reserved 



When I Was a Girl in Holland 



4 



± 



SEP -7 1917 



IRorwooD lpress 

BERWICK & SMITH CO. 

Norwood, Mass. 

U. s. A. 

©CLA473366 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 






PAGE 


I. 


When I Was Born 


• < 


II 


II. 


My Baby Brother 


. 


17 


III. 


Our House 


• i 


21 


IV. 


How We Dressed 


. 


■ 37 


V. 


Our Village School 


. , 


45 


VI. 


Some of Our Games . 


. , 


57 


VII. 


Our Holidays . 


. 


70 


VIII. 


St. Martin and St. Nicholas 


78 


IX. 


Farm Life 


, 


86 


X. 


The Storks 


, 


108 


XI. 


The Walks We Took 


» 


• ii3 


XII. 


The Kermis 


• 


121 


XIII. 


Leeuwarden and Sneek 


, 


. 126 


XIV. 


Dutch and Frisian . 


• < 


132 


XV. 


Our Canal- Boats 


. , 


136 


XVI. 


Playing in the Snow 


. , 


142 


XVII. 


On Skates . 


• 


- 145 


XVIII. 


Legends and Anecdotes 


„ 


. 160 


XIX. 


Birthday Parties 




■ 171 


XX. 


My Dreams of the Future 


. 176 


XXI. 


The Wedding . 


. 


184 


XXII. 


How I Continued My Studies 


192 


XXIII. 


Crossing the Ocean . 

7 


• 


203 



:::? 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Cornelia de Groot 



Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

16 



/ 



Scene in the Village of Deersum 

Church in Deersum .... 

Rear View of our New Farmhouse . 

Cow-Stalls in our New Farmhouse . 

Corner of Living-Room in our New Farmhouse 

Living- Apartment in our New Farmhouse 

The Author's Mother . . ' . 

Queen Wilhelmina of Holland 

Merry-Go-Round at Kermis in the Village of 
Deersum . . . . . 



Skating-Race of Couples at Village of Deersum 

Flower-Market at Sneek 

Market-Day at Leeuwarden 

Scene near Village of Weidum, Friesland 

View of Moat or " Gracht " at Leeuwarden 

Scene in the Village of Poppingawier 



16 

28 
3* 
36' 

40 



44 

122 
122 
128 
128 
136 
152 
152 



*x 



9 



WHEN I WAS A GIRL 
IN HOLLAND 



CHAPTER I 

WHEN I WAS BOEN 

On a farm, in the province of Friesland, 
near the little village of Deersum, I was 
born on the ninth day of the year. My 
advent caused quite an excitement, just as 
that of each of three sisters and two broth- 
ers had done previously. One brother 
had not lived for me to know him. 

That same day an elderly woman wad- 
dled from house to house all through the 
village and up the road and across mead- 
ows to the farmers. She knocked at the 
doors, called " Folk in," and when the 
housewife appeared, extended to her the 
11 



12 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

greetings of my parents, told her that a 
little girl had been born to them and in- 
vited her to the celebration to be held ten 
days from then. 

I was laid in a big, old-fashioned wicker 
cradle on rockers, on a soft, downy bed, be- 
tween snow-white sheets and covered with 
the softest blankets. Over the whole of 
the cradle, touching the floor, was draped 
a cover of heavy green damask, to keep 
the draft out. 

During the next ten days, little blond, 
red-cheeked girls came trudging through 
the snow. Some were carrying parcels 
in their mittened hands, others had flat 
red-painted boxes. They knocked at the 
front door, called " Folk in," and were 
led into the house. They placed the par- 
cel or the box in the hands of the maid 
and timidly said : 

" The compliments of mother, and here 
is a present." 

The present appeared to be a dress, an 
apron, a petticoat, or a pair of socks, if it 



WHEN I WAS BOEN 13 

came from a parcel, but if it was taken 
from a box it was bound to be a large 
layer-cake or several small tarts, baked 
by the village baker or bought in the 
nearest town, and intended for the party. 
Then the fat nurse would lead the shy lit- 
tle girl to the cradle, push the green cover 
slightly aside, and ask : 

11 Isn't baby pretty ? " 

And the little girl would place her 
finger in her mouth and nod, " Yes." 

" Don't you wish you had such a new 
baby sister?" 

And again she would nod and stammer 
a faint " Yes," while all the time she was 
afraid that I might wake up and start to 
cry. I fear some of these little girls when 
they said " Yes " and nodded were telling 
a little fib so as not to hurt my feelings. 
Now the girl was led into the big living- 
room and seated on an old-fashioned 
chair with reed bottom ; on the table be- 
fore her was placed a dainty, crisp Dutch 
rusk covered with butter and sugar. 



14 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

This she ate, that I might grow up into a 
healthy and strong child. 

I had been swaddled around tightly 
with such a lot of heavy, woolen cloths, 
from my neck to the ends of my red toes, 
that I somewhat resembled a cocoon. 
Thus I was dressed for four weeks ; after 
that I appeared in petticoats, dress, and 
apron. 

When I was ten days old, I gave my 
first real party, or rather, it was given by 
my mother in my honor. At about ten 
or eleven in the morning, a large number 
of village women and farmers' wives, some 
young and slim, others middle-aged and 
fat, came filling the enormously big front- 
room. My mother and her guests — about 
thirty women — were seated around the 
table in the center of the room. The 
women belonged to every social rank of 
our village. They did a lot of talking, 
and one by one they took me in their laps 
and chattered, and smiled at me, and they 
all gave my mother a great deal of advice. 



WHEN I WAS BORN 15 

On the table stood several cakes, rich 
and full of currants. There were also 
large, decorated layer-cakes, small tarts 
and deliciously spiced " koeken." A 
koek is a long cake. And there were 
many sorts of cookies. But the most im- 
portant part of the feast was the cup with 
" boerejongens " or farmer-boys. Now, 
don't be horrified ! These good women 
were no cannibals ; they did not eat little 
boys. The " boerejongens " were only 
boiled raisins steeped in brandy, to which 
sugar and spices had been added. The 
old-fashioned, beautifully wrought silver 
cup had somewhat the shape of a loving- 
cup, and was filled and emptied several 
times. From this cup the " boerejongens " 
were dipped with a solid silver spoon into 
the glasses near the plates of the guests. 

In former times, no glasses were used, 
and the cup with the tablespoon did the 
rounds from guest to guest ; helping him- 
self, each person drank a spoonful when 
his turn came. But in later years people 



16 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

became finical and each preferred a glass 
with a small spoon to himself. 

And so the women feasted and chat- 
tered and gave advice and laughed at each 
other's jokes until it was time for them to 
go home at about three or four in the 
afternoon. 

Like my sisters and brothers, I received 
as a present from my parents a large, 
beautiful, solid silver tablespoon with my 
name and date of birth engraved on it. 




Scene in the Village of Deersum. 
Birthplace of the author of this book. 




.£■;;; 







Church in Deersum. 



CHAPTER II 

MY BABY BROTHER 

The next great event in my life, and 
the first one that I can remember, was 
the birth of my baby brother. I was 
three years and six months old. 

One morning, while my sister Anna, 
who was seven, and I were sitting on a 
piece of wood in the big yard, she said to 
me: 

" A new baby brother came this morn- 
ing." 

Now I suppose I should have been very 
happy and excited and smiling all over. 
I am sorry to say such was not the case. 
I looked somber and thoughtful and did 
not show any interest. Later in the day, 
the hired girls and the men who worked 
on the place asked me whether I was not 
glad with the baby. They teased me. 
17 



IS WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

They said that the newcomer was taking 
my place and that I no longer was 
" mother's darling," all of which I took 
very much to heart. Naturally I began 
to look upon the baby as an intruder. I 
refused to see him, and when I finally, 
mastered by the nurse, gazed at a tiny 
red creature unlike anything I had 
ever seen before, my whole soul was in 
rebellion. The idea that such a small, 
insignificant-looking piece of humanity 
should wield such a power ! That he 
should have taken my place in the family 
and everybody be his slave ! 

One day I saw the old family doctor 
enter the house with my father. I did 
not at all feel friendly towards him, for I 
suspected him of having brought the 
baby. I stuck my head under the table 
and from out the corners of my eyes 
looked at him to see whether he was 
bringing any more children. I was re- 
lieved to notice that he carried no parcel. 
But perhaps he was hiding one under his 



MY BAB Y BROTHER 19 

coat. So I stole another glance at him, 
which reassured me that I had nothing 
to fear. 

I also suspected a neighbor, the mother 
of many children, of having something to 
do with my brother's arrival. Therefore, 
when she brought me some candy, I 
refused to accept it and even tore her 
dainty, black silk apron. 

As the days went by I became less 
resentful and even came to like the child. 
Sometimes, when he cried, I was en- 
trusted with the task of rocking the 
cradle. But I was warned not to rock 
too hard, or the same thing might happen 
to him as had happened to me when I 
lay in the cradle, which was this : My 
sister Anna often had to rock me to 
sleep. She was very industrious and 
worked with all her might and strength. 
One day, when I was unusually cross, 
she rocked harder than ever. Bang, the 
cradle tumbled over. I fell out of it and 
on top of Anna, who had slipped, and the 



20 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

cradle with the covers on top of us. I 
instantly stopped crying, but now it was 
my sister who cried. She yelled at the 
top of her voice. So now, when it had 
become my duty to rock the cradle, I was 
warned from time to time not to be too 
energetic. 



CHAPTER III 

OUR HOUSE 

Our house, like nearly all Dutch 
houses, was built of tiny bricks on a 
deep, firm foundation. It was by far the 
oldest house in and around our village, 
and one of the gables was covered with 
ivy. 

Like all the farmhouses of our prov- 
ince, the rooms and barns were built 
under one high, steep roof of tiles. The 
part containing the rooms was supposed 
to be about three hundred years old ; 
the rest had been rebuilt in the year 
1780. Yet in spite of the venerable age 
of the house, the windows were larger 
than those I have seen in many cottages 
of rural United States. We had two cow- 
stables, one had stalls for twenty cows 
with two standing in one stall, and the 
21 



22 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

other could contain twelve cows and 
heifers and two horses. 

That part of the house which was the 
barn proper and which we called " schuur " 
was used largely for the storing of hay, but 
it also contained the family carriage, the 
tilbury (which is a vehicle on two high 
wheels and with a seat for two persons), 
the work-bench, tools, harnesses, two hay- 
wagons, a churn-mill, two maize and lin- 
seed and bean mills, one horse-stable, spaces 
for calves, etc. The carriage and the til- 
bury were covered with big pieces of heavy 
muslin to protect them from the dust. 

Some farmers had separate coach- 
houses, but we were not quite so for- 
tunate. Only a small part of the floor 
of the schuur was brick-paved ; the rest 
was of earth. The dairy contained the 
big churn, which, through the wall, was 
connected with the churn-mill in the 
schuur. There was also a large cellar for 
the milk. 

Our living-room was big. Three of its 



OUR HOUSE 23 

walls were covered with white, glazed tiles, 
which were washed off once a week, and 
once a year the mortar between the tiles 
was whitewashed. The fourth wall was 
wainscoted ; two wall-, box- or closet-beds 
and a china-closet were built into this 
wall. Beneath each closet-bed was a 
cellar with doors. The closet-beds had 
doors, too, which during the day were 
always closed, and behind the doors 
hung colored and flowered curtains. At 
night we opened one of the two doors 
each box-bed possessed, but the curtains 
were seldom pushed entirely aside, for 
fear of draft and cold. Even in the 
modern homes in Friesland one finds 
these unhygienic closet-beds. 

The enormous fireplace was built 
against, and not inside, one of the tiled 
walls. The wooden base of the very 
wide chimney stopped a couple of feet 
below the ceiling ; it was about three 
feet by six and ended in a mantelpiece. 
This mantelpiece was adorned with 



24 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

pretty plates and bowls of old china. 
But below the mantelpiece, over a slant- 
ing board, hung, in the winter, a sort of 
curtain about a foot in width ; it was 
part cotton and part leather and on it 
were printed landscapes and people ; in 
the summer a more pretentious curtain 
of printed muslin stiffly starched and 
accordion-pleated was fastened around 
the mantelpiece. Farther up, the chim- 
ney narrowed until it changed into a 
brick top on the roof. Inside the chim- 
ney, at about the height of the ceiling, 
were laid some yellow-painted boards so 
as to make the opening smaller and keep 
out the draft. 

The floor beneath this big chimney 
was covered with an iron slab painted 
black. Against the tiles, some of which 
were decorated with pictures of fat 
cherubs blowing trumpets, stood a black- 
painted iron slab about three feet by 
four and rounded at the top. It must 
have weighed somewhere between two 



OUR HOUSE 25 

hundred and three hundred pounds. 
My father told that once his mother 
employed a young girl who carried the 
slab back and forth as if it were a toy. 
Years ago a fire burned on this hearth, 
but long before I was born stoves had 
come into use and increased the comfort 
of the people. 

We washed the woodwork of our 
living-room once a week with warm 
soap-suds, and cleaned the windows in- 
side and out, and the window-sills and 
the casements inside and out, with fresh 
water, so that they always shone as 
bright as bright could be. All the 
chairs, tables, wardrobes, etc., were pol- 
ished on Saturdays. The ceiling, painted 
dark red, as was the other woodwork, and 
washed off every few weeks, was sup- 
ported by very heavy beams. The paneled 
wall, above the box-beds, was decorated 
with a row of very large, heavy, blue and 
white plates of old chinaware, and some 
pretty, old, china bowls. 



26 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

When I was a baby, the floor of this 
room was of green, glazed tiles ; these 
being rather cold, even though always 
covered with matting and rugs, were 
later taken out and a wooden floor was 
put in. This floor was painted a glossy 
red. Each day we mopped it with 
a large, square piece of heavy cotton, 
called a " dweil " and a bucket of water 
fetched from the moat. After that, we 
polished it with wax. A large rug lay un- 
der the table, and this was taken up and 
shaken once a week. A strip of matting 
lay the length of the room in front of the 
paneled wall, and over this in front of the 
doors of the closet-beds and the china 
closet, as also in front of three other 
doors, lay small rugs. The latter were 
shaken each day ; the matting was taken 
up and beaten as well as washed off on 
both sides with hot soap-suds every Fri- 
day. Of the Frisian housewives may 
truly be said that their work is never 
done. 



OUR HOUSE 27 

The immense front-room was wall- 
papered instead of tiled, but its floor 
had retained its glazed tiles, which were 
covered with a carpet and over this lay 
one large rug and several small rugs. 
The paneled wall, the doors and ceiling 
were painted light green. The chimney 
was even bigger than the one in the 
living-room. In the center of the room 
stood a mahogany table. This front-room 
was so cold and damp that even during 
the summer we often had to build a fire 
in the stove to prevent the furniture and 
other things from being spoiled. In fact, 
the whole house was very damp ; shoes 
and clothes in the closets would become 
thoroughly mildewed and even the bread 
in a very few days would become thor- 
oughly spoiled by mildew. We had to 
wage constant war against moisture. 

Our house being so very old, in some 
places the ceiling was not strong. My 
younger brother, discovering such a 
"weak spot," just for the fun of it, as 



28 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

boys will do, jumped on it. Suddenly, 
to his great surprise, down he went, in a 
cloud of dust, and fell on the floor of the 
little cow-barn. Unlike the Katzenjam- 
mer boys, he needed no tools to break 
through a ceiling. Fortunately, he was 
not hurt. 

Besides, the house was not only too 
small for us and our belongings, but the 
builder evidently had had only one idea 
in his mind, and that idea was to make 
it as inconvenient and unpractical as pos- 
sible and to make housekeeping as hard 
and laborious as it could be made. When 
I was no longer a child, the whole house 
was taken down and in its place erected 
an up-to-date Frisian farmhouse, much 
larger and far more convenient than the 
old one ; roomy and with many large 
windows. 

It was no more than natural that we 
should possess many queer, old-fashioned 
utensils. We had several brass and cop- 
per kettles, and two brass lamps in which 




Rear view of our new farmhouse. 




Cow-stalls in our new farmhouse. 



OUR BOUSE 29 

we burned strings of twisted cotton with 
rape-seed oil. One of these was a hanging 
lamp and was used in the cow-barns to- 
gether with a modern lantern ; the other 
stood on a brass foot and was used for 
carrying around in the house, being safer 
for that purpose than kerosene lamps. 
The rape-seed oil was kept in a brass can. 
All these brass and copper utensils were 
polished every Saturday. 

One of the attics contained such queer 
things as high silk stovepipe hats, old- 
fashioned swallow-tail coats and knee- 
breeches of black satin ; large, old man's 
shirts of home-made linen ; these things 
had once been worn by some of our an- 
cestors; there also was mother's hoop- 
skirt, worn by her when she was a young 
girl. We children always played with it, 
when, during the spring house-cleaning, 
it was taken down into the yard for an 
airing. 

In the attic were also a couple of brass 
bed-warmers or warming-pans with long 



30 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

brass handles ; and there was a bowl 
and pan which once had been used 
for the making of mustard. In our 
front-room we had quite a collection of 
dainty cups and saucers, teapots, cream- 
ers, sugar-bowls and such things ; these 
had come down to us from former gen- 
erations. We never used them. They 
were taken out of the shallow closet with 
its glass door only to be washed off once 
in a while by mother herself. Often we 
were offered high prices for them by 
travelling merchants, but my parents did 
not want to part with them for any 
amount of money. 

Paper window-shades were unknown 
in Holland. We had wooden blinds for 
our windows ; some on the inside, others 
on the outside. In the summer, we had 
lace curtains ; in the winter curtains of a 
heavy cream-colored cloth, the bottom 
part of which was embroidered in a 
pretty design and edged with fringes or 
crocheted point-lace. The latter could 



OUR HOUSE 31 

be lowered or rolled up at will, but they 
were usually hanging a little below the 
middle of the windows, and the interior 
of the room was protected from the curi- 
ous gaze of strangers by a row of flower- 
pots. 

Outside, in front of each door, was a 
pavement of from three feet square to 
four or five times that size. These pave- 
ments, made of small, white bricks were 
scrubbed every day or once a week and 
kept as clean as possible. We were 
not allowed to walk on them with our 
wooden shoes. When we wore leather 
shoes, we first had thoroughly to rub 
them clean on rather thin, white, cotton 
" dweils "; one of which lay in a corner 
of the pavement and another in front of 
the door. And around these pavements 
one might see stationed the wooden shoes 
of all the members of our family. 

For fuel we used mostly turf or peat, 
but in the winter also quite a lot of an- 
thracite coal or coke. Turf, however, we 



32 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

always used for cooking. We had mod- 
ern heating stoves, which, in comparison 
to their small size, gave a great deal of 
heat, took up little space, were very neat 
and of nice appearance, and were of no 
danger to little children. In these we 
could not burn peat. 

We bought our turf from the turf-skip- 
pers. There were two kinds ; one, soft, 
fibrous, brown, much longer than it was 
thick and wide. We called it long turf 
and it had been dug out of the soil. The 
other was dark blue, almost black, as 
wide as it was long and two or three 
inches thick. We called it hard turf and 
it was dredged out of pools, laid to dry 
on the fields and cut into squares. It 
did not ignite half so quick as the long 
turf, but it lasted much longer, and 
when it became all aglow, it was often 
placed in a small stone pot called " test " 
in a foot-warmer, or underneath old- 
fashioned copper coffee-pots ; even kettles 
of water were heated and often food was 



OUR HOUSE 33 

cooked on these hot coals. They were 
very unhygienic, taking the oxygen out 
of a room and replacing it with carbonic 
acid. 

We also had a " doofpot," which was 
a copper vessel with a brass lid. When 
after dinner or supper we no longer 
needed a big fire, we put the remaining 
hard coals, be they entirely or partly 
glowing, in this receptacle. The replac- 
ing of them in the stove, a few of the 
softest fibres of the long turf, and a 
burning match, were all that was neces- 
sary to start a new fire in a few mo- 
ments. This contrivance was not only 
a great convenience, but it cut down 
household expenses. It prevented waste. 
The lid on the doofpot was very tight- 
fitting, so that not a bit of smoke could 
escape, nor could any air reach the coals 
to keep them burning. 

The little foot-warmers called " stoven " 
and used so much by the women, were 
wooden stools perforated on top and one 



34 WEEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

side was missing. Inside was a " test " 
containing a glowing hard turf. The 
men-folks and we children used foot- 
warmers that were much longer, flatter, 
and wider and covered with an iron slab. 
The one we children used was large 
enough for three pairs of little feet, and 
with room to spare. It was a very wel- 
come article on winter evenings and 
mornings. 

The house, yard, and orchard were sur- 
rounded partly by a moat or narrow ca- 
nal and for the rest by a corral, a fence 
and a hedge of hawthorn. In the yard 
stood, part of the time, one or two high 
stacks of hay, for lack of space in the 
schuur ; also a wooden outhouse for two 
cows and a brick pig-sty. On one side 
of the sty, by way of a lean-to, stood a 
brick chicken-run with windows, while 
the roost was over the sty. There was a 
wooden chicken-house in the orchard. 

This orchard was bordered by rows of 
pollard willows, plane trees and poplars 



OUR HOUSE 35 

and ashes ; it contained forty apple and 
pear trees and one plum tree, all for 
home use. The grass grew luxuriously 
among them, and there were also a small 
flower garden and rose-bushes. A large 
lawn was hedged off for the bleaching of 
the family linen. For each week, when 
the clothes had been washed and boiled, 
the white pieces were bleached on the 
grass for two days, after that rinsed and 
hung on a line or racks to dry. 

We had a lot of tame ducks, and wild 
ducks joined them once in a while. As 
early as February we placed baskets of 
braided straw, in the shape of an hour- 
glass but with one end closed and 
rounded, the other open, in the trees ; 
some in the pollard willows about four 
feet from the ground ; others in the 
poplars and ashes about twenty feet from 
the ground. 

To reach these baskets in order to 
gather the eggs, we had to climb on a 
ladder. Now, I have often told people 



36 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

in this country that our tame ducks laid 
their eggs in these baskets and they 
would laugh and say that tame ducks 
cannot fly. But our ducks did fly a 
little. They could fly high enough to 
get into these baskets. Sometimes 
chickens, too, would get into them. 
And sometimes the cats, but then there 
was trouble. And once in a great while 
a skunk, and then there was still more 
trouble ! 




Corner of living-room in our new farmhouse. 

The walls are tiled. 



> 









Living-apartment in our new farmhouse. 
In the tree is a duck-basket. 



CHAPTER IV 

HOW WE DKESSED 

I suppose you think that all Dutch 
girls look like those with the long skirts 
and the winged caps that artists like to 
draw for books and post-cards. The fact 
is that while some have this picturesque 
attire, the great majority are dressed quite 
differently and very variedly. 

As for myself and playmates, our 
many pieces of loose and heavy under- 
clothing made us appear very round and 
fat and clumsy. We wore a flannel 
shirt without any shape, next a loose 
chemise of muslin, then a knitted "borst- 
rok " or breast-skirt of worsted or cotton 
yarn according to the season ; on top of 
this a " lyfje " or underwaist, next some- 
thing resembling a corset-cover made of 
either woolen or cotton material. Each 
37 



38 WEEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

and every one of these garments was 
thick and heavy. 

Our dresses were made of durable woolen 
goods, usually dark-colored. Sometimes, 
in warm weather, I wore a calico dress. 
White dresses were out of the question. 
And how I did long for one ! The nearest 
I ever came to having my wish fulfilled 
was the present of a yellow old dress that 
had first been owned by one of my sisters 
and that now I was allowed to appear in 
while playing around the house and help- 
ing with the hay harvest. 

On Sundays I wore a big, white apron ; 
on week-days one that was striped, check- 
ered, or flowered. We had long sleeves — 
in our dresses, I mean — or, in case of 
short sleeves, wore long knitted bands 
that reached from above the elbow to the 
wrist. Our parents were always afraid 
that we might catch cold. 

We seldom received more than one dress 
a year. Clothes were made so that they 
could be lengthened and widened ; they 



HOW WE DRESSED 39 

had to last a long time and were fre- 
quently patched. I usually had one dress 
for best, which I wore only a few times 
during the first year, when its status was 
lowered to that of Sunday dress. Next 
came the school dress and the meanest 
and oldest of all was the play and work 
dress. Sometimes I had school and play 
dresses made out of those outgrown by 
my sisters. 

On my feet I always wore woolen 
stockings and over these black or dark 
blue socks of a heavier worsted. The 
socks served two purposes. They not 
only kept the feet warm, but prevented 
them from becoming sore from rub- 
bing against the hard wooden shoes 
or klompen, and they also made these 
klompen fit snugly around the feet. Be- 
fore entering the house, the school or the 
stores, we always took our klompen off 
and walked in our heavy socks. On the 
stone and brick floors of the dairy, milk- 
cellar, and cow-barns — in the latter only 



40 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

in the summer time — we all wore leather 
slippers resembling in shape those worn 
by the Japanese. Sometimes we put on 
clean old klompen that were for indoor 
use only. When going to church, to 
town, and during the summer if it did 
not rain we always wore leather shoes, 
high or low. 

My blond hair did not dangle in two 
braids on my back, as the hair of Dutch 
girls is supposed to do. I boasted only 
one braid with a ribbon at the end. A 
pretty comb prevented stray locks from 
falling on my forehead. Or my hair just 
hung loose with a lock near each ear 
taken up and fastened together with a 
ribbon on the top of the head. I have 
seen American girls wear their hair in 
similar fashion. One day my oldest sister 
cut bangs for me. 

Now I shall tell you how the women of 
our province dressed. My mother wore 
a helmet made of the purest, softest gold, 
and beneath it a white muslin cap with 




The author's mother. 
Wearing gold helmet with lace covering. 



HOW WE DRESSED 41 

pretty, tightly crocheted border for the 
back of the neck, and over this — except 
over the border — one of black silk. When 
visiting, going to church or to town, 
mother covered this helmet with a beauti- 
ful cap of old lace that had a border of 
rounded folds standing straight from the 
neck at an angle of about forty-five de- 
grees. 

On top of all these caps she tied an 
ugly, modern bonnet. How would you 
like such an elaborate head-gear? But 
this was not all. Near the ears, and be- 
side the silver and diamond stick-pins, 
mother had attached to the gold cap or- 
naments resembling miniature shields or 
large buttons. Some of the farmers' wives 
also had fastened on their foreheads silver 
plates studded with diamonds. Contrary 
to popular belief, these ornaments, caps 
and all, were not heirlooms. The wives 
of the carpenters, bakers, coopers, and 
other tradesmen, and of small shopkeep- 
ers had gold caps, which in most cases, 



42 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

but not necessarily, were much smaller 
and resembled two shields fastened to- 
gether by a chain. They wore no plates 
with diamonds. The caps of the wives of 
the day-laborers were made of silver and 
their clothes were very simple and of 
coarse, cheap material. 

The helmet is called " ooryzer " by the 
Dutch ; this means ear-iron. It took 
many generations for this ear-iron to reach 
its present stage. Its very beginning is 
to be seen in the museum at Leeuwarden, 
the capital of our province. It was a nar- 
row strip of iron that, centuries ago, in 
fact, more than a thousand years, was 
worn by the Frisian women around their 
heads, by way of a bandeau, from ear to 
ear ; hence its name. As time went by, 
the band was broadened and the iron re- 
placed by silver and finally by gold for 
those who could afford the latter. 

At last, there evolved the full-fledged 
helmet, and just when it had reached per- 
fection, its doom was sounded. It began 



HOW WE DEESSED 43 

to disappear. Only elderly women still 
wear the pretty head-dress of Friesland 
nowadays. Another generation, and there 
will be none left. The helmet does not 
add to one's comfort. It prevents venti- 
lation to a great extent, and my mother 
often had to take it off because of severe 
headaches. 

At the age of twelve, my mother re- 
ceived her first ear-iron. It was of silver. 
When she reached her sixteenth year, her 
parents bought her the golden helmet 
that to-day, at the age of sixty-eight, she 
is still wearing. However, in the morn- 
ing, when my mother did her work, she 
did not wear the helmet, but a white, 
crocheted cap only ; it was simple, pretty 
and neat. 

Once, when Queen Wilhelmina, at the 
age of twelve, visited Friesland for the 
first time as queen, the women of our 
province presented her with the old- Fris- 
ian costume, not only the helmet and ac- 
cessories, but also the old-fashioned dress 



44 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

with its pretty fichu, that was worn many, 
many years ago and now is seen only in 
historical plays and pageants. The Queen 
actually wore the whole costume and was 
photographed in it, to the great delight of 
the people. 




Queen Wilhelmina. of Holland. 



CHAPTER V 

OUR VILLAGE SCHOOL 

At the age of five, on the first day of 
April, I entered the village school. Our 
schoolhouse contained two rooms ; in the 
larger the master taught the higher grades, 
in the smaller the woman teacher the 
lower grades. There were altogether from 
about forty-five to fifty pupils. No one 
teacher was ever allowed to have more 
than forty. With me, two other new 
pupils, a boy and a girl, were admitted. 
We were very bashful and timid. We 
were placed on the row of lowest benches, 
next to the high windows and nearest the 
big stove. 

The first few days we were a sore trial 

to the teacher. It was hard to teach us 

to sit still and be quiet. Also, we had to 

be taught a new language. Thus far we 

45 



46 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

had spoken Frisian only ; now we had to 
be taught Dutch. Gradually we learned 
to make simple strokes and hooks with a 
slate-pencil on a slate, and such truths as 
that one and one make two, and one and 
two make three. 

One wall of our schoolroom was almost 
entirely covered with pictures. It was 
from the upper row of these pictures that 
we were to learn the alphabet, and it took 
us almost a year to do so. It went this 
way. The teacher fetched the first pic- 
ture, representing a rose, and fastened it 
onto the blackboard. Rose in Dutch 
is spelled " roos " and pronounced very 
similar to rose in English. The teacher 
would ask : " What do you see on this 
picture?" We answered: "A roos." 
Then she asked : " What sound do you 
hear when you say l roos ' ? " And we 
were expected to answer " oo." She 
wrote " oo " on the blackboard and it 
was for us to remember that this funny- 
looking mark represented the " oo." 



UR VILLAGE SCHOOL 47 

Next came the " r " and then " s." 
We pronounced the consonants as they 
sounded and not by their alphabetical 
name. Then we had to repeat r-oo-s, 
r-oo-s, quicker each time until the three 
letters came rolling off our tongues in 
such rapid succession that they sounded 
like the word " roos." 

The second picture was fetched at some 
future lesson. It represented a pear. 
Pear in Dutch spells " peer." Thus we 
learned the vowel sound, " ee," and the 
consonant, " p." The next step was the 
making of other words, some of them 
meaningless, with the letters we had so 
far learned. The third picture repre- 
sented a hat, which in Dutch is spelled 
" hoed " and pronounced " hoot." And 
"oe" and "d" were added to our 
store of knowledge. Next came picture 
number four ; I believe it was of a saw, 
spelled " zaag " and pronounced " zahg " 
with a long " a " as in " father," and with 
a guttural " g." 



48 WHEN I WAS A QIRL IN HOLLAND 

By the end of the first year we not 
only could read quite a bit, but also 
add, subtract, and multiply with figures 
below ten. And we had learned to sing. 
Our school hours had been from eight to 
ten and from one to three in the summer, 
and from half-past eight to ten and from 
one to three in the winter. On Saturdays 
and Wednesdays we had the afternoon off. 

In the second grade we had our first 
reader. The books belonged to the school 
and were returned to the teacher after 
each lesson. We never had any spelling 
lessons to learn. We had simple rules 
of spelling and with these we started in 
the third grade. But we had to learn 
an enormous amount of grammar, with 
which we started in the fourth grade. 
Dutch grammar is very intricate. 

In the second and third grades we 
learned about the other rows of pictures 
on the wall. Twice a week we were 
asked all sorts of questions as to what 
we saw on a particular picture which was 



OUR VILLAGE SCHOOL 49 

fastened on to the blackboard, and about 
the colors ; then the teacher explained at 
length all sorts of things unknown to 
simple village and farmers' children. 
Afterwards we had to make a little com- 
position about what we had learned and 
about what we saw on the picture. These 
rows of pictures held a great fascination 
for me. Whenever I was through with 
my arithmetic or writing lesson, and did 
not feel like drawing on my slate and 
was not in a mood to get into mischief, I 
would look at those pictures on the wall 
and dream of the big world outside, the 
world I was so anxious to see, of its cities, 
but above all, of its forests, its lakes, and 
the sea ! 

There was one other addition to our 
second grade curriculum. That was knit- 
ting. Every morning, from 10 : 30 to 
11:30, except on Wednesday and Satur- 
day, we had to knit. 

Many an afternoon I had to stay in 
after school, from a few minutes to a 



50 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

couple of hours, and had to fill my slate 
with such sentences as " I must sit still " 
and " I may not talk." Instead of being 
humbled by all the punishment I re- 
ceived, it made me all the more audacious 
and the saucier, for I gloried in proving 
to the other children that I dared to 
defy the teacher in spite of what I knew 
was sure to follow, such as having to stay 
in, to stand in a corner and of having my 
ears slapped. Teachers were not allowed 
to administer any kind of corporal pun- 
ishment to us, but it was only in extreme 
cases that parents interfered. 

We nicknamed our teacher " peper- 
noot " because she was so very short. A 
" pepernoot" is a small spiced cookie the 
size of a marble. 

In every grade we had what we called 
sneaks. A sneak was a child who was 
mischievous only when the teacher was 
not looking ; one who talked and laughed 
and giggled and stuck out his tongue, 
made his eyes roll, pulled at the corners 



OUR VILLAGE SCHOOL 51 

of his mouth until these corners almost 
reached his ears or were on a level with 
his nostrils ; who stuck a pin into other 
children, pulled at their hair ; all this he 
would do when the teacher's back was 
turned, but as soon as she glanced in his 
direction he would look as demure and 
innocent as a saint, and the wrong child 
was punished. Such a sneak was loathed 
by the whole class. We had nothing but 
contempt for him. 

Though I was very saucy and mis- 
chievous, I was very fond of my lessons. 
There never was a time that I did not 
like to study. I was usually at the head 
of my class, and it was only when I had 
earned a larger than usual amount of pun- 
ishment that I was lowered for a while. 

In the higher grades, under the man 
teacher, our curriculum was quite large, 
and of all the studies it was the writing 
of compositions I liked best, and next 
came geography. I still remember the 
first map I drew of the United States. 



52 WHEN I WAS A OIBL IN HOLLAND 

On the walls of the larger schoolroom 
were the pictures of all the Dutch birds ; 
also pictures of the human skeleton and 
the vital organs. Of these pictures we 
were taught in due time. And there 
were the weights and measures ; these 
were not pictures, they were real. We 
were taught the metric system although 
in daily life the old-fashioned el, kop, 
mudde, mengel, and kan were used. We 
had a school library of from one hundred 
to two hundred books. 

When we entered the fourth grade, 
which was in the large schoolroom, we 
had our lessons in knitting, sewing, 
crocheting, darning, knitting-darning, 
and cross-stitching from three to four 
o'clock on four afternoons and from 
10:30 to 11:30 on two mornings. The 
sewing lessons consisted only in the mak- 
ing of all sorts of seams and stitches. 

When I was nine years old some of 
my girl chums were taking more ad- 
vanced sewing lessons, right after school, 



OUB VILLAGE SCHOOL 53 

from four to six, from a seamstress. As 
all my little friends were there, I asked 
my mother permission to join the class, 
and obtained it. We sat in a small room 
on stools or low chairs. There was no 
table. 

We always pinned our sewing to our 
knees. This has a decided advantage 
over sewing over one's finger, as one can 
keep the work much straighter. When 
you sew two pieces together over your 
finger, the one nearer the finger will, in 
the end, stick out a little over the other 
one, as with each stitch you skip with 
the needle an infinitesimal part more of 
the upper piece than of the lower. 

We did not use sewing-machines. Un- 
less the weather was raw, the outside door 
of the little room was open. If it was very 
warm, we sat outside. We were allowed 
to talk as much as we wanted to, sing, 
laugh, tell stories, and solve riddles. 
And at times we quarreled. We made 
and hemmed underclothing, aprons, bed 



54 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

and table linen and towels only. The 
making of waists and dresses was sup- 
posed to be far too difficult work for 
children. 

And we made innumerable patches, 
Such a patch was a veritable work of art. 
It was done very neatly ; the corners had 
to be exactly at ninety degrees and per- 
fect. On both sides of the material the 
patch looked finished. I have never in 
this country seen anybody patch the way 
we did. It took lots of time, but then, 
our seamstress used to say : 

" When it is finished, some one who 
sees it will ask ' Who did this ? ' and not 
1 How much time was spent on it ? ' " 

These simple people attached little 
value to time. We never had to hurry, 
thank goodness. 

I attended this sewing class for three 
summers until I was twelve years old. 

The grading of our village school was 
very inadequate. There were only six 
grades, and at the age of ten I was in the 



OUR VILLAGE SCHOOL 55 

highest. So I stayed in that sixth grade 
for three whole years, repeating over and 
over again lessons in Dutch history, geog- 
raphy, botany, and grammar. Even most 
of the readers remained the same. It was 
only in arithmetic, writing, the reading 
of music, rudimentary knowledge of civ- 
ics, and a few other minor branches that 
I advanced. It was mostly a shameful 
waste of time. Matters were now some- 
what aggravated by my taking private 
lessons in arithmetic, grammar, reading, 
geography, and composition four hours a 
week. The result was that the book of 
grammar I studied in the evening was 
far more advanced than the one I had at 
school. 

An insatiable thirst for knowledge now 
seized me. I wanted to know everything 
that was to be known. I studied as hard 
as I could. It was then that I sowed the 
seeds of all my troubles of the years to 
come. I studied too persistently, took 
little interest in play, with the exception 



56 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

of skating in the winter, of course. The 
two half-hours of calisthenics and a few 
duties at home were nearly all the exer- 
cise I got, and of fresh air I got less, not 
even at night, as we slept with closed 
windows. 

One of the best features of the Amer- 
ican public school I consider to be the 
keeping of a staff of school doctors, 
nurses, and dentists. The next best step 
towards a better civilization, I believe, 
would be the compulsory training of all 
young women in the care of the baby 
and the older child, such as our hospital 
nurses receive. How much more happi- 
ness this would produce than the ability 
to draw pictures and to recite a poem 
correctly I 



CHAPTER VI 

SOME OF OUR GAMES 

One of our most popular games was 
called "verlos," pronounced "ferl6s," with 
the accent on the last syllable. It was 
played by all the boys and the girls to- 
gether. The child who was "it," whom 
we shall call Jan, chased the others until 
he managed to touch one of them, whom 
we shall call Piet. Then he would run 
to the tree or lantern pole around which 
the game was played. If Piet reached 
the pole first, he was free ; if Jan reached 
it first, Piet had to stay near the pole 
or tree, keeping either his hand or foot 
against it. Now Jan ran after the other 
children again. 

In the meantime he had to take care 
that none of them came near Piet, for if 
Piet was touched by any of them, he was 
57 



58 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

released, while any child touched by Jan 
joined Piet, and they all, hand in hand, 
formed a long row, with the pole or tree 
at the farther end. It was a very excit- 
ing game, for the longer the row grew, 
the easier it became to reach it and touch 
it, but at the same time the fewer chil- 
dren there remained free. 

Often, when nearly all were caught 
and the game was almost finished, Jan 
would at quite a distance from the row, 
say, just behind the wall of the inn, suc- 
ceed in touching one of the fleetest run- 
ners ; at the same time, from a hiding- 
place in another direction, another child 
would hie and release the row before 
Jan had returned to prevent the catas- 
trophe. Then a loud " hoozay " would 
fill the air. The noise we made on such 
an occasion would have put the yells of 
college boys to shame. Many a " verlos" 
game was never finished. 

Rope-jumping was exclusively for girls. 
We had several different games of rope- 



SOME OF OUB GAMES 59 

jumping. The most popular one was the 
game of imitation. The girl who was 
first would jump a number of times with 
both feet, then with the left foot and 
then hop with the right, or she would 
hop on one side, turn about and hop on 
the other side ; or she would drop a 
stone, hop a certain number of times 
and then pick it up. The game could 
be played in an unending variety. The 
second, the third, and if there were as 
many, also the fourth and the fifth girl 
all had to do exactly as she had done, 
when their turn came. Whoever tripped 
or made a mistake, would have to relieve 
one of the two girls who turned the rope. 
Sometimes a girl would jump in, hop, 
and run out in the diagonal direction ; 
while she ran out the second girl would 
jump in ; while the second one ran out the 
third would run in ; after her the fourth 
and the fifth and then again the first, 
who, in the meantime, had walked back 
and was waiting at the starting-point. 



60 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

At other times we would jump rope 
while all of us were running. At again 
other times two or more girls jumped at 
the same time. On occasion we also used 
two ropes, turning them together but in 
opposite directions. The same thing I 
have seen in this country. We also had 
short ropes for individual use. 

A favorite game of the boys was roll- 
ing hoops. Why this game is so little 
played in America I cannot understand. 
In some localities in the Netherlands 
girls also rolled hoops, but such was not 
the case in our village. 

Both boys and girls played with mar- 
bles. Some, as large as a child's fist, 
were called backets ; others, somewhat 
smaller, bosters ; those of ordinary size, 
knikkers. 

Shooting hazelnuts or horse-chestnuts 
was a favorite game in its season. Each 
child— there were from three to half a 
dozen participants — contributed two ha- 
zelnuts, or two horse-chestnuts, as the 



SOME OF OUR GAMES 61 

case might be, and these were placed in 
a row, the biggest one, called king, at the 
end on the right-hand side ; then came 
the next in size called queen, and then 
the princes and princesses, all according 
to size, the youngest princess at the end. 
The child whose turn it was would roll 



DIAGRAM FOR 
GAME OF SHELLS 



a boster towards the row. If he hit the 
king, the whole row was his ; if the 
queen, all except the king; if the crown 
prince, all except the king and queen, etc. ; 
if the little princess at the end, only her. 
Shells of walnuts we also played 
with. We first made the accompanying 
diagram on the ground. From three to 



62 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

six children usually played. Each in 
turn threw a nutshell in the direction of 
the little square, called the pot, over the 
center of the horizontal line. The one 
who threw his shell right into the pot 
had won the game and all the shells 
were his. If no one was quite so lucky, 
the one whose shell lay nearest the pot, 
but over the horizontal line, picked up 
and kept as his own all those that had 
fallen over the line. Then he picked up 
those below the line, shook them and 
threw them up into the air. When they 
had come down again, the shells that 
lay flat he picked up and kept; the 
others were picked up and tossed by the 
child whose shell had been second near- 
est the pot. He, too, kept those that fell 
down flat, and the third child tossed the 
remainder if there were any, and kept 
those that came down flat. And thus 
the game was kept up until all the shells 
had come down flat and been appropri- 
ated. 



SOME OF OUB GAMES 63 

A game we enjoyed playing on winter 
evenings in the moonlight or near the 
street-lanterns, before supper time, was 
called " ambachten," which means 
" trades." I believe many of you are 
familiar with a similar game, called 
" charades." From six to twelve children 
were necessary to play it, and they were 
divided into two equal groups. First 
one group would act a pantomime and the 
other group would look on and guess its 
meaning. Then the second group would 
act a pantomime and the first group would 
have to do the guessing. The game was 
capable of an endless variety and was fine 
exercise for our imaginations. 

We also played jacks, but the jacks were 
of a different shape from what yours are. 
Most of them were only certain bones out 
of the bodies of cattle. Yes, we actually 
played with soup-bones cleaned and pol- 
ished. Little children using their vivid 
imaginations, filled whole stables with 
cows, calves, horses, and pigs, which were 



64 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

nothing more nor less than bones out of 
butchered cows. 

Baseball was unknown to us. The boys 
did have a certain kind of ball game, but 
they seldom played it, as it was more for 
young men. We girls used the colored 
rubber balls and threw them against the 
brick wall of the school. Sometimes one 
just caught the ball, at other times one 
clapped one's hands and then caught the 
ball, or one circled one's arms around and 
around, or caught the ball with the left 
hand and then with the right hand, or 
jumped while catching it, etc. All the 
while the player and the other children 
chanted a certain ditty that gave direc- 
tions as to how the ball had to be caught. 
If one missed the ball, it was the next 
child's turn. 

We had few parties, no playground, no 
rings, no slide, no seesaw except some- 
times a home-made one, and, part of the 
time, a home-made swing in our orchard 
and the cow-barn ; we had very few dolls 



SOME OF OUR GAMES 65 

and these few had to last for years, few 
dishes, and these were easily lost or broken 
so that we preferred to play with the 
broken dishes of our mothers, yet we had 
a great deal of fun. Having few toys, we 
made better use of our imaginations than 
those who have many. Besides, we had 
a very large variety of extremely inter- 
esting and exciting games, that gave us 
lots of exercise and for which no toys 
whatever were needed. 

At home we often played " Punch and 
Judy/' or, as we called it, " poppenspel," 
which means dolls' play. We tied a ban- 
dana handkerchief around a ball of yarn 
and called it a doll. We made many of 
these, and made them dance on the edge 
of an old, horizontally stretched cow- 
blanket across a cow-stall ; it being in the 
summer, the stalls were empty and clean. 
Or we fastened a sheet across the stall, 
placed a small lamp in the darkened space 
behind it, and made ducks swim on bil- 
lowing lakes, men chase boys, teachers 



66 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

punish children, etc., all cut out of paper 
and reflected on the sheet. We especially 
enjoyed having the ducks swim on the 
waves. We had a ditty, which started 
somewhat like this : " All pretty duck- 
lings, they swim in the water, falderal- 
deriere, falderalderare." 

In the early spring jumping ditches 
was our favorite pastime. For the small 
ditches, called " greppels," we did not 
need any stick or pole. We just ran 
until we reached the edge and then 
jumped across it and as far as we could. 

At one time, when I was about ten 
years old, several of us girls were jump- 
ing across those greppels, one after the 
other, and each greppel was wider than 
the one before. One by one the girls 
dropped out. At last only two remained, 
of which I was one and the other a girl 
called Antje, a year older than I was, and 
taller. She was the leader. We came 
to a very wide cross-greppel. She ran, 
jumped, and landed on the other side. 



SOME OF OUR GAMES 67 

I looked at the expanse of water and my 
heart quailed. But I thought whatever 
she could do, I could. So I mustered 
up my courage. I ran, reached the edge, 
and again my heart quailed. My feet 
stopped. But my body, unable to stop 
the forward motion so suddenly, fell for- 
ward and there I stood, with my legs, 
that had slipped, up to my knees in 
the water, and with my arms up to the 
elbows. 

Just then the clock struck one and the 
other children ran off to school as fast 
as they could. Only one girl, called 
Tjerkje, stayed with me. I sat down 
on the damp grass, pulled off my stock- 
ings and socks and wrung them out as 
well as I could and put them on again. 
I remember that I had a little hole in 
the heel of one of my stockings ; by the 
time I had it pulled on again the hole 
looked as large as a saucer. Then I put 
on my socks and stuck my feet in my 
wooden shoes and Tjerkje and I trudged 



68 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

to school. There, near the door, stood 
my sister waiting for me. " You must 
go home and change your stockings and 
socks," she said ; " you will get sick if 
you don't." 

But I did not want to go home and 
entered the school. Antje had told the 
schoolmaster that the wind had blown 
me into the greppel. The master teased 
me about it, and, strange to say, did 
not send me home. So there I sat, for 
three hours, wet to my knees. I did 
not tell my parents of my accident, nor 
did my sister. But two days later I had 
to go to bed with a fever and a sore 
throat. The old doctor was summoned 
and he said that I had tonsilitis. I was 
sick for five weeks, and part of that time 
had to stay in bed, and all the time in 
the house. 

The boys leaped with poles over the 
larger ditches, called " slooten " and the 
small canals called " vaarten " or " grach- 
ten," according to purpose or size. Most 



SOME OF OUR GAMES 69 

of the girls also jumped across slooten, 
and some even across vaarten and grach- 
ten. We enjoyed going to the big canal 
or " trekvaart," with a pole across our 
shoulders, leaping over the slooten we 
met until we stood on the dike of the 
trekvaart. There grew such pretty flowers 
right at the edge, and certain reeds that 
made such queer whistles. 



CHAPTER VII 

OUR HOLIDAYS 

Our spring vacation fell on the last 
week of April. While we had our week 
of play, the janitor removed the stoves 
from the schoolrooms and held a thor- 
ough, general school-cleaning, and the vil- 
lage painter came and painted the floors. 

Easter and Whitsuntide — the latter 
falls on the seventh Sunday after Easter 
— were celebrated for two days; there- 
fore, we had vacation on Easter Monday 
and on the Monday after Whitsunday, as 
also on Good Friday and on Ascension 
Day. On Whitsunday we dressed up in 
new clothes, and put on new spring hats, 
as you do on Easter. On Easter it is too 
cold in Holland for spring clothes. Even 
on Whitsunday it may hail or snow and 
be very disagreeable. 
70 



OUR HOLIDAYS 71 

We village children had only two 
weeks of vacation during the summer. 
Just think of it. Not two months, but 
two weeks. When I was nine years old, 
my parents took me in our carriage to 
Sneek, our nearest town, and there they 
put me on one of our small canal 
steamers. Most of the men passengers 
on the steamer were known to my 
parents. They were prosperous butter, 
cheese, or cattle merchants. They prom- 
ised that they would see to it that I 
reached my destination in safety. We 
very slowly steamed along canals, across 
the Sneeker Lake, and then again along 
other canals. It was about a three hours' 
boat-ride, and I enjoyed every minute 
of it. 

The following summer, I again spent 
my vacation with my grandparents at 
Oldeboorn, which is the name of the 
large village where they lived. Then I 
had a little playmate who was the sole 
possessor of eight dolls. Eight dolls ! 



72 WEEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

It almost took my breath away. I had 
only one real doll. This seemed luxury 
indeed ! 

When I was twelve, I was to take a 
somewhat longer trip. A girl of my age 
came to stay at our house for a week, and 
after that I went with her to stay at her 
house for a week. She lived in a very 
large, pretty village called De Joure. 
There were nurseries of young trees, 
something I had never seen before, and 
pretty lanes with shrubbery on both 
sides. We enjoyed wandering through 
them. But the most interesting part of 
De Joure was the estate of a family be- 
longing to the nobility. Every Sunday 
the public was permitted to walk through 
its gardens and park and conservatory, 
while the head gardener accompanied 
them. 

At one point in the park was a 
low but steep, small, grass-covered hill- 
ock, wholly artificial. It was the first 
hill or something resembling a hill I 



OUB HOLIDAYS 73 

had ever seen. On top of it stood 
a tower, called an observatory. We 
climbed up into the little room in the 
top of this tower, and from the windows 
had a lovely view over the surrounding 
country. In a large register we wrote 
our names. Then we descended. The 
boys of the crowd tried to run down the 
steep hillside ; it was something novel to 
them, and while doing so, unable to re- 
main on their feet, they fell and started 
to roll ; they rolled over and over again 
to the delight of the crowd, until they 
struck the path at the foot of the hillock. 

There was a sort of bower across one of 
the paths. When we walked through it, 
by a secret device the gardener made the 
water most unexpectedly come down like 
a shower all over us. We spent a whole 
afternoon on the grounds and certainly 
had the time of our lives. 

Our Christmas vacation lasted about 
ten days. Christmas was celebrated very 
quietly and for two days. The first day 



74 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

we went to church with our parents. I 
sat deep down in a big pew with my 
mother, and she gave me her cushion to 
sit on. 

Under her feet mother had one of 
the " stoven " or foot-warmers. Every 
other Sunday — our parish consisting of 
two villages, in each one of which a 
service was held every other Sunday — 
during the cold season, a woman of the 
village placed a glowing hard turf in 
mother's stoof just before nine o'clock, 
when the service started. Many of the 
women who lived in the village, them- 
selves carried a stoof by a brass handle as 
they entered the church. It was never 
cold, though, for there was a red-hot 
stove, and the church was not large, 
though high. My mother carried a 
" kerkboek " or hymnal to church ; it 
had two pretty, wrought silver clasps. 
We carried smaller ones without clasps. 

Our church dated from before the time 
of the Norsemen, who, with their Vi- 



OUR HOLIDAYS 75 

kings, came from Norway in the eleventh 
century and harassed the peoples who 
lived south of them. Traces of these 
Norsemen are still evident. At the time 
of the Reformation, in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, the congregation became Protestant ; 
they severed their connections with the 
Catholic church, but kept the house of 
worship and its property. They demol- 
ished all interior decorations and statues 
and ever since the walls have been white, 
bare, and ugly. 

At noon, on Christmas, we ate for des- 
sert a lot of bread-pudding, and in the 
evening, also with our tea and coffee, big, 
long loaves of sweet bread so full of cur- 
rants that you could not see anything 
but currants. 

If the ice was strong, everybody went 
skating except those who were very 
pious ; they considered it sinful to enjoy 
themselves on Christmas. 

On New Year's Eve we again went to 
church. To the large congregation, the 



76 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

preacher, called " domine " in Dutch, 
would review the year's events and re- 
member those of the village people who 
had died during the past twelve months. 
By nine o'clock we were home and soon 
after went to bed. 

On New Year's Day we arose early. It 
was great fun for us to hide behind a door 
and to await the coming of mother and 
older sisters, and sometimes of neighbors 
and friends whom we had seen approach- 
ing, and surprise them by crying the 
Frisian equivalent for Happy New Year. 
The fun came in trying to " beat the 
others to it." However, one had to be 
out of bed, though it was not necessary 
to be all dressed. A little later, there 
was more excitement. The poorest of 
the village children would come, in twos, 
in threes or in fours, knock at the door, 
open it as far as the brass chain would 
allow, and cry with loud voice : " Much 
happiness and many blessings in the 
New Year." That sounds like a big 



OUR HOLIDAYS 77 

mouthful, but expressed in Frisian it was 
rather short. One of us children would 
sit near the door, with a cup full of pen- 
nies, and to each child we gave a couple 
of them. These poor urchins would go 
to all the farmers and well-to-do villag- 
ers, all before noon, and for the pennies 
thus gathered, their mothers would buy 
them a warm cap, a pair of mittens, 
klompen, or wool mufflers. 

At about twelve, we had still greater 
fun. The postman, overworked man as 
he was that day, but also much-treated 
man (many people insisted upon his 
drinking a glass of gin when delivering 
the mail that day) brought us a stack of 
post-cards, some for father and mother, 
and some for each of us. All our 
friends, though some lived next door, 
remembered us with pretty cards, and it 
was fun to read the little verses under- 
neath the pictures. 

And in the afternoon, if the ice was 
strong, we went skating. 



CHAPTER VIII 

ST. MARTIN AND ST. NICHOLAS 

As you have your St. Valentine and 
your Hallowe'en, so we had St. Martin 
and St. Nicholas. 

St. Martin was celebrated on November 
eleventh, but only in such villages and 
towns as had preserved ancient customs. 
On the evening of the eleventh, soon 
after we had come out of school and it 
was dark, we gathered a lot of dry twigs 
and shavings, and if possible, we pro- 
cured a tarred barrel. We toted these 
things to a meadow right back of the 
village. There we built a fire and we 
danced and shouted around it as if we 
had been wild Indians. Father used to 
tell us of a boy who ran right through 
the flames of a St. Martin's fire, scorching 
his hair and clothes. I deplored the 
78 



ST. MARTIN AND ST. NICHOLAS 79 

degenerate days I had been born in, for 
there was not a single boy among us 
children who had the courage to follow 
this hero's example. 

When the fire was out, we walked two 
or three abreast, holding Chinese lanterns 
or a candle stuck in a turnip with a paper 
bag around it, somewhat resembling your 
pumpkins on Hallowe'en. Some of the 
boys had firecrackers. We sang many 
school songs and also a ditty about 
St. Martin being very cold and needing 
fire-wood, while we were serenading some 
of the village people and the nearest 
farmers, who rewarded us with a few 
cents. Later we went to the baker and 
bought cookies and sweets for the money 
and divided this amongst ourselves. 
Thus the fun ended. 

The day of days, to us, was the sixth 
of December, St. Nicholas Day. St. Nich- 
olas was once a bishop in Spain and be- 
loved by all for his good deeds. That was 
many hundreds of years ago, but since 



SO WH£N I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

then he is supposed to come from Spain 
with his black servant each December. 

He is said to ride on a white horse 
through the air, and on the eve of 
the sixth, his feast day, to jump from 
roof to roof, where he descends through 
the chimney into the house. There he 
finds, standing in a row, the children's 
baskets with a tuft of hay for his horse 
in each of them, and he fills them with 
sweets and toys if the little ones have 
been good, with a turf and salt if they 
have been bad or are becoming too big to 
be thus remembered by him. Then he 
hides the baskets somewhere in the room. 
Noiselessly, he now climbs up through 
the chimney, mounts his waiting charger 
and visits another house. 

Several mornings before the great event 
we would find a sort of ginger-cake 
called " taai-taai," in the form of a woman 
at the churn, Adam and Eve under the 
apple-tree, of a boy or a girl, or some an- 
imal, in our stockings as we awoke. In 



ST. M Alt TIN AND ST. NICHOLAS 81 

the evening, especially on the eve of the 
sixth, St. Nicholas himself, dressed in 
a long tabard with mitre on his head, 
followed by his black servant who carried 
a bag, would enter the living-room. 
Sometimes the good saint was dressed 
up so unsaintlike, resembling more a 
tramp-burglar than a bishop, that we 
little ones were frightened and hid be- 
hind mother's chair, although we quite 
well knew there was no such thing as a 
" Sinterklaas," as we called him in Fris- 
ian. He would ask whether we had been 
good or bad ; if bad, his servant would 
take us along in the bag and carry us to 
the attic where he was supposed to keep 
a mill, and in this mill he would grind 
us to pepernoten or peppernuts, the tiny 
gingerbread cookies. Of course, mother 
always said we had been good children, 
and then he would open the bag and 
throw handfuls of pepernoten on the 
floor. We forgot our fear, and coming 
out of our hiding-places, we picked up 



82 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

the cookies, finding them in every corner 
of the room. 

Early in the morning of the sixth we 
awoke, and in our nightclothes and on 
bare feet we would run into the very 
cold front-room and hunt for the bas- 
kets. They were hidden in some corner, 
behind a piece of furniture or in a 
closet. As soon as we had found them 
we carried them into the warm living- 
room and there we examined the con- 
tents, consisting of one toy or a book for 
each of us, and several figures, some large, 
others small, of taai-taai, the brown, flat, 
tough cake, of which we were so fond, 
and which was made by the bakers all 
through the country on this feast of St. 
Nicholas only. There was always a girl, 
a couple of feet tall, for a boy, and a boy 
for a girl, and these we hung against 
the wall and kept for weeks sometimes. 
The others lasted only a few days. 

Then there were figures and letters made 
of a sweeter kind of cake, more peperno- 



ST. MARTIN AND ST. NICHOLAS 83 

ten, cookies, letters of sweet chocolate, 
and hearts of a very sweet pink or white 
candy, and the initial of our given name 
made of a deliciously light pastry, the 
filling of which was made of almonds 
and other ingredients. We called it 
" marsepyn." It was very rich and by 
every one considered a great delicacy. 
We also received a flat cake, resembling 
a pancake ; it was sweet and decorated 
with gold tinsels. 

We went to school early that morning 
to tell other children of the treasures we 
had received and to make comparisons. 
Now, for years we had known the truth 
about St. Nicholas ; I had discovered 
it at the age of six, but the little comedy 
was kept up each year, just as a child may 
talk to a doll while knowing very well 
that it is not alive and cannot hear. 
And our fear of St. Nicholas when he was 
dressed so disreputably and growled so 
fiercely, was genuine, although we did 
not believe in him. 



84 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

In school, the younger children sang a 
song in his honor and the teacher also 
gave them each a figure of taai-taai. 

On the eve of St. Nicholas, many 
grown-ups and also some of the older 
children went to the baker to listen to 
the results of the raffle which he had 
been conducting. Our family usually 
won at least one prize, and sometimes 
two. These were several letters of marse- 
pyn, taai-taai, big cakes, gigantic loaves 
of bread with currants, or other sweets. 
Small shopkeepers held raffles of toys, 
dry-goods and other things. 

The baker that evening also conducted 
a sort of gambling hall in his bakery. 
Young and old were throwing dice to win 
more taai-taai and more sweets. These 
people never gambled at any other time, 
many never even played cards, yet at such 
a time some of them would not stop until 
all their available cash was gone and 
they had nothing to show for their folly 
but heaps of cakes and tarts and other 



ST. MARTIN AND ST. NICHOLAS 85 

sweet stuff. It was a very good day for 
the bakers. A few years ago, a law was 
passed, prohibiting this raffling and dice- 
throwing. 

We children did some impersonating 
St. Nicholas on our own account, too. A 
couple of evenings before St. Nicholas 
Eve we dressed up in old clothes that be- 
longed to our mothers and older sisters, 
and tied before our faces masks of paper 
which we had cut out and colored our- 
selves. We put on long gloves, and, 
supplied with a big bag of pepernoten, 
went to a few of the poorest homes where 
there were several little tots, and, open- 
ing the front door carefully, threw hand- 
fuls of the confectionery on the floor. 
We must have been a queer lot of 
Sinterklaases, and I am sure that the 
fun it gave us must have far exceeded in 
magnitude the good and pleasure the 
poor children derived from the few peper- 
noten. 



CHAPTER IX 

FAEM LIFE 

The Dutch call their country Neder- 
land, which, translated, is Netherland. 
Formerly it was " de Nederlanden," or 
The Netherlands. It is divided into 
eleven provinces, and the two most im- 
portant ones are South and North Hol- 
land. Hence the popular name Holland. 
Friesland is one of the most northerly 
as well as one of the most prosperous 
provinces. 

The Frisian fields are perfectly level. 
They are separated from each other by 
slooten and divided into rectangular 
pieces by greppels. About two thousand 
years ago the Frisians, who had just mi- 
grated from somewhere in Germany, set- 
tled in our province. They were barba- 
86 



FARM LIFE 87 

rians, in fact, little more than savages. 
The country was very marshy, and where 
now is the Zuider Zee, was then only 
Lake Flevo. 

For ages, when it was stormy, the sea 
had overflown the low land. Each time 
it had left behind a layer of decayed 
rock that originally had come from 
other countries, scraped from mountains 
by glaciers and driven into the sea by 
icebergs. These innumerable layers of 
decayed rock formed the rich, heavy 
clay that gives Netherland its glorious 
meadows and makes possible its raising 
of splendid cattle. The meadows are 
beautifully green, full of rich clover and 
dotted with buttercups, daisies and other 
wild-flowers. 

The barbarians, however, did not know 
about raising cattle and growing grain. 
They were lured hither by the abun- 
dance of fish, fowl, wild boars and wild 
cows, and they wanted to stay there. 
They did not like to be driven away by 



88 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

the waves that came rolling in from the 
sea. So they piled the earth into mounts, 
they made hillocks, and they called them 
" terpen. " These terpen still exist. They 
are no longer hillocks, but perfectly flat 
meadows a few feet higher than the other 
meadows. On these terpen the barbarians 
built their huts, and they lived unmolested 
by the sea. 

Gradually they became civilized. They 
learned to protect the land from the sea by 
dikes. The Romans taught them to build 
canals and drain the fields. The terpen 
are of the richest clay and in these modern 
times are gradually being leveled. The 
soil is sold at a big price and shipped to 
other parts of the country where it fertil- 
izes a poor soil. While digging in the 
earth, the workmen often find queer ob- 
jects, which are placed in the museum at 
Leeuwarden. 

The great majority of the farms in Fries- 
land are owned by rich people, many of 
whom belong to the nobility. The farm- 



FARM LIFE 89 

ers pay an enormously high rent, from 
nine hundred to fifteen hundred dollars 
a year for seventy or eighty acres and 
farmhouse. Besides this, they have to 
pay wages to a lot of farm help, and yet, 
if their rent is not too high, they manage 
to make a good living, bring up a large 
family and save a little fortune for their 
old age. This is due to the fertility of 
the soil, the excellent care they give same 
by frequent fertilization, the strictest 
economy, and wise management. How- 
ever, they have to work very hard, their 
worry is great, their pleasures are few and 
simple, and some are forced to give up 
their favorite occupation, sell out and go 
to America. 

Meanwhile, the owners, who do not 
soil their hands, who do not weary their 
brains, enjoy themselves. And the farm- 
ers, in spite of their native pride and in- 
dependence, for fear of losing the farms 
and because of the demand for farms 
always far overtopping the supply, look 



90 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

up to these owners and treat them as 
demigods. I, who had always a strong 
sense of justice, never could understand 
why the farmers were so foolish and so ir- 
rational. 

My parents usually had about thirty 
milch cows, nearly all black and white. 
These Frisian-Holstein cows give much 
more milk than the Jerseys ; their milk is 
not so rich in butter-fat but contains 
more of the stuff out of which cheese is 
made. 

From October to May our cows stood 
in the barns, two in a stall. The stalls 
were about a foot higher than the brick- 
paved floor. In each stall was a small 
window with four tiny panes and if the 
cows cared to they might look out. Their 
tails were fastened with a rope to the 
beams, but not so that it prevented their 
chasing the flies off their backs. The 
idea was the prevention of the cattle 
hanging their tails in the gutter. 

Twice a week our hired man used thor- 



FARM LIFE 91 

oughly to wash the cows' tails in a large, 
red-painted bucket of water, and after that 
he straightened out their hairs, one by 
one. We often helped him with the lat- 
ter. The tails of some cows are curly, 
and I assure you, these looked very pretty 
after having been washed and disen- 
tangled. The hired man also curried the 
cows, as one does horses, so they always 
looked clean and sleek. 

Besides hay, we often fed the cows a 
certain cake cooked of cracked beans and 
ground linseed, in the winter. The pigs 
ate cooked cracked maize. 

In May, as soon as the cows had been 
led into the meadows, a man scrubbed 
the cow-barns thoroughly clean, from top 
to bottom ; then the womenfolks did the 
whitewashing and the fixing up ; before 
the tiny windows they hung lace curtains, 
also for the larger ones at the end of the 
barn, and the painter came and did his 
share with red and black paint, to the 
walls and the stalls, and he painted the 



92 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

large, heavy wooden buckets and other 
wooden things. 

Every morning at four o'clock and 
every evening at four, the cows were 
driven into the corral close to the house, 
and there milked. Some one asked me 
once : " Why did you not leave them 
overnight in the corral ; then you would 
not have to gather them so early in the 
morning ; it would save work and time." 
But the Frisian farmer never thinks 
of saving time if it means less money. 
Cows like to graze late in the evening, 
during the night or early in the morn- 
ing, and the more they graze the more 
milk they give. Besides, they are more 
comfortable in the meadow than in the 
corral. During the fall, they were cov- 
ered with a blanket to protect them from 
the cold and rain. This blanket some- 
what resembled grey burlap ; however, 
it was heavier and much more tightly 
woven. 

In the spring and the summer three or 



FARM LIFE 93 

four big churns half-filled with cream 
were churned by a horse attached to a 
mill. The butter was worked by my 
mother. The skimmed milk with a little 
of the cream left in was made into Edam 
cheese by my father, and we children 
helped. We also assisted with the col- 
oring of the round little cheeses with 
aniline dye or their polishing with lin- 
seed oil. 

We did not use a separator for the 
skimming of the milk. The milk was 
simply poured into large, flat, round- 
bottomed copper pans, and these pans 
stood in rows in the milk cellar against 
the walls on brick elevations a foot higher 
than the spacious stone floor. While 
stooping over, my mother skimmed the 
milk with a flat, circular brass pan, and 
emptied the cream into a very large, 
copper pail with brass handle and brass 
rim, and from this into blue-painted bar- 
rels. As all empty brass and copper 
things were scoured each day, you can 



94 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

imagine what an enormous amount of 
work this meant. 

In the summer all the milking was 
done in these big copper pails with the 
brass rim and brass handle, and that were 
as wide at the bottom as at the top. The 
average farmer's daughter or milkmaid 
carried these pails full of milk, either by 
hand or dangling from a yoke over her 
shoulders, as easily as if they were the 
ordinary tin buckets one finds in this 
country. I, however, was never able 
even to lift them when filled. 

The buttermilk was fed to the calves 
and the pigs. The whey, left over from 
the cheese-making, was also fed to the 
calves and the pigs. We never wasted 
anything, not so much as a crust of bread, 
a tuft of hay, or a cup of buttermilk un- 
less it was by accident. 

In the fall and the winter we did not 
make cheese. Then all the milk was 
churned, as there was much less of it. 

In the early spring I often had to help 



FARM LIFE 95 

with the feeding of the young calves, that 
immediately after their birth were taken 
away from their mothers. I hated the 
work even more than I disliked washing 
dishes. 

We usually had a dozen sheep. When, 
in the late spring, they had been sheared 
and their lambs taken away from them, 
they were daily milked twice. We chil- 
dren had to do the milking. The milk 
of sheep is very rich, much richer than 
cow's milk, and therefore not to be 
recommended for drinking purposes. In 
coffee and tea it is excellent and takes 
the place of cream. We also fed it, mixed 
with buttermilk, to the calves, and once 
in a while one of my sisters made little 
cheeses of it for home use. 

Our sheep were entirely white and their 
fleeces were nice and clean. Sometimes 
we had one or two black sheep. Once, 
when I was milking the sheep all alone, 
the ram came. He was a big, strong, 
beautiful creature and father prized him 



96 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

highly. But he did not like petticoats. 
When my brother was with me, he was 
rather respectful. Now seeing me alone, 
he came running at me. I stood still, 
waiting for him. It was too late for run- 
ning away. 

I knew he was many times stronger 
than I was, but my safety lay in taking 
hold of his horns, so that he could not 
maul me. I waited, with both hands 
stretched out. When he had approached 
me, I gripped the horns. Then I yelled. 
I yelled for help at the top of my 
lungs. 

No one in or near the house seemed 
to hear me. In the meantime the ram 
pushed me backwards towards the canal. 
I yelled still louder. Just when I stood 
at the edge of the water, desperately 
holding on to the ram's horns, a man 
came running across the foot-bridge. 
With his heavy cane he chased the ram 
away. He was a cattle merchant, and 
while passing on the highway, had seen 



FARM LIFE 97 

me and heard my cries. He saved me 
just in time. 

In the spring we had to drive the 
young lambs into the schuur in the 
evening and back into the meadows in 
the morning, and often in the daytime 
we had to lead them away from the 
slooten to prevent their getting drowned. 

Farm help, that is to say the young 
men and the young women who work on 
the farm for their board and wages, are 
hired by the year. They may be hired 
some time during the winter, but they 
do not leave their old employers before 
the thirteenth of May, when they go to 
their new employers. 

Fortunately, they have never heard 
that the number thirteen is unlucky, or 
they surely would not change their po- 
sitions on the thirteenth. The Frisians 
are singularly free from superstition. 
However, the number eleven was our 
hoodoo. Not that it meant bad luck, 
but we associated it with craziness. The 



98 WHEN I WAS A OIRL IN HOLLAND 

one who in a raffle drew the number 
eleven was laughed at and called crazy. 
If you were eleven years old, you were 
teased with being queer. And so in 
every case where the number eleven ap- 
peared. It was not really a superstition, 
but a joke. 

Then there were the day-laborers, 
married men who went home at night 
and sometimes for their meals also. 
They helped with the milking, feeding, 
hay harvest, fertilizing, ditch-dredging, 
etc. 

For many years, during the hay har- 
vest we had two Germans from Olden- 
burg do the mowing, and two from 
Prussia help with the gathering. But 
finally the Germans remained in their 
own country, where they could find 
enough work, and we hired men from 
the neighboring province of Groningen, 
or some from another part of Friesland, 
where the soil was unproductive and the 
people were poor. The latter were very 



FARM LIFE 99 

independent and not nearly so good- 
natured as the foreigners. Also, many 
of them, as soon as they had earned a 
little money, spent it, on the first San- 
day, for gin and got drunk, and for the 
next few days they would not be able to 
work. This made them unreliable and a 
nuisance as well. However, there were 
good men among them, too. 

The hay harvest to us children was one 
long, lively, happy festival. It lasted 
about four or five weeks, according to 
the weather. Our greatest pleasure was 
to ride on those empty wagons to the 
meadows and on the full ones back home. 
These wagons, like almost everything else 
in Netherland, were painted in bright 
colors ; they were loosely put together, 
had no springs, and when they were 
empty, and driven over the hard, dry 
soil or the brick road, they so shook that 
we children, sitting on them, with our 
legs dangling from behind, had to hold 
on to the sides, and it felt as if our lungs, 



100 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

stomach, heart, and liver were playing 
tag in our bodies. 

On the return trip it was different. 
Unless an older person was with us, we 
were not allowed to sit on top of the hay. 
The driver always sat on a low seat and 
could not possibly watch us, or even 
see us. Then the horses always walked 
slowly. 

Every afternoon after school, and on 
Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, we 
helped with the hay harvest. We had 
small rakes, specially made for us, and we 
raked in the front rows, which were the 
easiest. It really did not mean work to 
us ; it was just fun. Often we would play 
in the haystacks, roll down their sides, 
and at times we were nearly buried under 
the hay. Village children would come 
and join us. 

We loved to pick the flowers that grew 
in the ditches and on the water's edge, 
such as blue-eyed forget-me-nots, and 
the fragrant wild mint. Sometimes we 



FARM LIFE 101 

hunted caterpillars and lady-bugs. These 
we put in match-boxes and gave them 
leaves to eat, but they often escaped. 
The lady-bugs were our favorites. My 
brother would sometimes chase us with 
frogs. We were not afraid of them, but the 
contact of their cold, slimy bodies is not 
pleasant. Sometimes we picked up all 
the feathers we could find. Those of the 
lapwing were most numerous ; they were 
half black and half white. We made quite 
a collection. We ran many races, in our 
stocking-feet or with slippers on. 

I enjoyed lying on my back and gazing 
through my straw hat at the blue sky 
and the white clouds. Netherland is 
known all over the world for it3 beauti- 
ful cloud effects, and this is one of the 
reasons that artists of other countries like 
to come there and paint. Out of the 
light fleecy clouds, the heavy ones like 
mountains of snow, those of a grey color 
and the gloomy, dark harbingers of 
a thunder-storm, I created castles and 



102 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

knights of old, the lofty Alps and the 
low sand-dunes, ruins of ancient cities, 
lakes, islands and even the outlines of 
whole continents. 

Our sunsets were glorious, and so 
were the sunrises. We were often up 
early enough to see them. Our twi- 
lights were long and the men, during 
the hay harvest, worked as long as they 
could see, which meant till ten o'clock, 
many a time. After that they had 
supper. 

By four in the morning they were up 
again and dressed, ready to go to work, 
before breakfast. But they did not work 
nearly so fast, and constantly as men work 
here. And they did a lot of talking and 
laughing. At seven they had their first 
meal, consisting of tea, rye bread, and but- 
ter and cheese. No meat, no potatoes. 
Yet the men were strong and healthy. 
We, the children, had to go to bed early 
until we were about twelve years old. 
After that, we, too, were allowed to stay 



FARM LIFE 103 

up as late as ten. I have often stood 
aghast at the American habit of allow- 
ing little boys and girls to stay up late 
at night and go out with their elders. 

For breakfast we children had rye 
bread with cheese or bacon, often also 
white bread and buns, and milk if we 
wanted it. The bacon was clearer and 
whiter than any bacon I have seen here ; 
it was smoked slowly in our enormous, 
old-fashioned chimneys, for months and 
months. We did not fry it. We just ate 
it as it was, for there was no danger of 
getting the deadly parasite, trichina, so 
often found in American pork. We cut 
it into very small cubes, placed these on 
the buttered, coarse rye bread (which is 
very different from the American rye 
bread) and we ate with great relish. 

At ten o'clock the folks had coffee and 
koek, at noon we had dinner. Though 
our meals were very simple at any time, 
during the hay harvest this was the case 
more so than ever. Then we dispensed 



104 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

with potatoes, except on Sundays. We 
ate green or dark grey peas, beans, pearl 
barley, with pork or bacon or veal and 
buttermilk porridge. 

At three in the afternoon one of my 
older sisters brought a big, brass kettle — 
which shone like a mirror — full of tea to 
the fields, and a basket with rye bread and 
butter and cheese. Lying down, in the 
shade of a stack, the men had their tea, 
without sugar and milk. Father, usually, 
came at about two o'clock, to join the men, 
and had tea with them, and so had we if 
it was Wednesday or Saturday. 

At four, those who did the milking 
went home, and the others stayed. At 
six, they drank coffee and ate koek once 
more, and after the day's work was over, 
all had supper at the house. Supper 
consisted of a dish made of milk, flour, 
and something resembling cracked wheat, 
only finer, and this was seasoned with a 
sort of sweet sauce. We children were 
very fond of it. But it was the tea at 



FARM LIFE 105 

three and the coffee at six, out in the 
open, that we enjoyed most of all. 

The Dutch summers are short and the 
thermometer seldom rises to eighty de- 
grees Fahrenheit. However, at seventy- 
five it is quite hot, because of the hu- 
midity of the air. There is a great deal 
of sultry weather. The Frisian evenings 
are always chilly. 

Every evening we were put to sleep by 
the croaking of the frogs. There were 
two kinds, the green ones, which were 
the larger kind, and the yellow ones. 
We used to throw pieces of brick at 
them as they stuck their heads above 
the water. It seems to me that they 
were bigger than the American frogs, 
and they had a far more agreeable way 
of croaking ; it was not so monotonous, 
there being a sort of tune to it. 

Do you remember the words of Cole- 
ridge's Ancient Mariner : " Water, water, 
everywhere, and not a drop to drink "? 
One could almost say the same of Neth- 



106 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

erland. Drinking-water there is poor. 
Where we lived, good wells were scarce. 
The water from most of them could be 
used for cattle only, and for washing and 
scrubbing, because of the composition of 
the soil. If we dug the wells very deep, 
down through the layer of clay, we were 
almost sure to find water that was brack- 
ish. 

We therefore used rain-water for cook- 
ing and drinking purposes. We kept it 
in a cistern, into which it fell through 
a pipe from the roof and gutters. The 
tiles of the roof were cleaned once a 
year, but that did not prevent a lot of 
dirt from entering the cistern with the 
water. No one, or at least extremely 
few people, used filters. We had our 
cistern cleaned as often as it was empty, 
and as it was small, it was empty quite 
frequently in the summer. In fact, often 
we had to buy buckets full of water from 
the neighbors, who, having larger cis- 
terns, or two of them, were more fortu- 



FARM LIFE 107 

nate. It was nothing unusual to find 
dead bugs and living bugs and other 
creeping things, especially salamanders, 
in the copper bucket as we pulled it up 
out of the cistern. We never boiled the 
water before drinking it, yet none of us 
ever had typhoid, bubonic plague, nor 
any of the other dreaded germ diseases. 



CHAPTER X 

THE STOEKS 

The stork is a much-beloved bird in 
Netherland. It builds its nest by prefer- 
ence on the brick chimneys of farm- 
houses. There are seldom more than 
one couple of storks in one small village, 
and the story runs that when a member 
of a family who have storks dies, the 
storks leave and will not return. Of 
course, this is an old superstition. Never- 
theless, it is true that when an old 
farmer who lived near our village had 
died during the winter, the storks that 
had been making their nest on his 
chimney for many a spring did not 
return to his bereaved family. They 
selected another house as their domicile 
and that house was ours. 

Storks seem to like old houses. They 
108 



THE STORKS 109 

alighted on our parlor chimney and 
started to build their nest. We were all 
very happy to have them. However, my 
parents, though they welcomed the birds, 
objected to their building on the brick 
chimney. We not only often heated the 
room in the summer, but the dust and 
dirt that might drop out of the nest 
would soil the parlor. 

So my father had the upper branches 
of the trunk of a high tree cut off, a 
wagon-wheel laid flat on this tree trunk, 
and a bundle of dry twigs placed on the 
wheel. At the same time, the nest the 
storks were building on the chimney was 
destroyed. And the wise birds took the 
hint, and built on the tree. 

Still, one cannot always coerce them. 
They have a will of their own. Our 
mayor, who lived on a fine old estate 
in a neighboring village, was very anx- 
ious to have storks. So he had a high 
pole built in front of his house, on 
top of that pole placed a wagon-wheel, 



110 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

and on the wheel a bunch of twigs. 
Each spring the storks, old ones and 
young ones, came and flew around the 
pole ; they hovered about it, flew back 
and forth, but never did a couple select 
the place for their home. 

It is a very funny sight, the feeding 
of the baby storks by their parents, and 
their learning to fly. Mother stork and 
father stork wade through the ditches, 
and when they see a frog, snap ! they 
snatch it with their long beaks and 
swallow it. Then they fly back to the 
nest where the three or four babies, with 
outstretched necks, screech as loud as 
they can, their beaks wide open. The 
parents throw up the frogs they have 
been safe-keeping in their crop, and let 
them slide from out their own beaks into 
the beaks of the young birds. 

Each spring there arrived from sunny 
Egypt our female stork alone, to await 
the coming of her mate two weeks later. 
But what happened one spring? Only 



THE STORKS 111 

two days after her arrival the husband 
came. We were surprised at his early 
appearance. We noticed that he was 
smaller than the female, while her mate 
of the years before had been of the same 
size. We concluded that the old one 
must have died during the winter and 
that she had chosen another. At any 
rate, they appeared perfectly happy and 
started to rebuild their nest. 

Then, at the usual time, two weeks after 
the coming of the female, there arrived the 
male of the previous summer. He did 
not scold his faithless wife, nor did he 
beat her or desert her. No, but he did 
fight the usurper. For days they fought, 
and they fought bitterly. The old one 
would hover for hours around the nest, 
waiting for the little one to leave it, and 
when the latter, who screamed madly, 
did leave it and advance, there was a 
battle royal. The female remained neu- 
tral. 

At last, after many days, the rightful 



112 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

owner of the nest conquered. He did 
not kill his enemy, but he beat him so 
severely that he left, never to return. 
And the female welcomed the hero and 
they lived happily ever afterward. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE WALKS WE TOOK 

During the summer some of us girls 
often took a walk to neighboring villages. 
We had a clean, brick-laid and shaded 
highway to walk on, or good, graveled 
roads, and sometimes we followed a foot- 
path or a wagon-road through the mead- 
ows and crossed foot-bridges. 

The wagon-road had once been a sea 
dike, many centuries ago, but gradually 
the water had receded and the land been 
reclaimed. Now the dike was a road and 
almost entirely overgrown with grass and 
wild flowers. Quite a number of villages 
were within easy walking distance, from 
two to ten miles away. I never missed 
one of these walks. 

Once, three other girls and I walked to 
a little village called Wieward, where, in a 
113 



114 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

tomb in the church, we viewed the bodies 
of several men and women who had died 
three or four hundred years ago. These 
bodies had never been embalmed ; never- 
theless, like the Egyptian mummies, they 
had not decayed. There was, however, 
in appearance a vast difference between 
them and the mummies. They were not 
dried up ; they had kept their rounded, 
full shape ; but the skin had taken on the 
color of parchment. The clothes had de- 
cayed and dwindled away to something 
that looked like thin potato peelings. 
The hair had disappeared. 

Why these bodies had never decayed, 
nobody seemed quite able to explain sat- 
isfactorily. Undoubtedly the chemical 
composition of the soil underneath, as it 
was absorbed in the water standing in the 
tomb, had something to do with it. For 
it contained about a foot of water, and 
one had to walk on boards. 

Once some people decided to drain it, 
and so they did. Then signs of decay 



THE WALKS WE TOOK 115 

were noticed, and immediately they re- 
filled the tomb with the same amount of 
water as there had been previously. Also, 
in late years, for experimental purposes, 
a dead cat and a rooster were placed in 
the tomb, and like the human bodies, 
they, too, remained preserved. Of course, 
we children — about nine or ten years old 
— looked on in awe and wonder. 

Not all our hikes ended happily and 
merrily. In some places we were not 
wanted. There was one village, also about 
three miles away, where the girls gave us 
a very cold reception. As soon as they 
saw us they started to follow us ; we en- 
tered a candy store and after we came out, 
there was quite a crowd waiting. They 
called us names, made fun of us, threw 
pieces of brick at us, and they were all 
ready for fist fights. But we did not want 
fist fights. And it was useless to talk of 
peace to them. So we ran. We ran as 
fast as we could, through streets and alleys 
and up the road, until we could run no 



116 WHEN I WAS A QIRL IX HOLLAND 

more. But they still followed us. They 
kept on following us. 

And why all this animosity? You 
could never guess. It was about the an- 
cient feminine weakness : clothes. At 
that time it was the fashion for women to 
wear bustles. The daughter of our baker, 
who was thirteen, and I, aged twelve 
(there were about six of us that Sunday) 
being almost young girls, wore bustles. 
And it seems that the daughters of this 
simpler village believed us to be too fash- 
ionably and too well-dressed. It was the 
old story over and over again : " Thou 
shalt not dress better than I do." And so 
they made us suffer. They followed us 
and jeered us until we had almost 
reached home. 

It seems unbelievable that at the time 
I was a girl, and perhaps this is the case 
even now, one found many benighted 
people, not only in out-of-the-way ham- 
lets, but also in the big cities, who openly 
made fun of and jeered others whose man- 



THE WALKS WE TOOK 117 

ners and dress appeared different from 
theirs or who showed themselves to be 
strangers. 

There was another village, in another 
direction, and also about three miles 
away, which village was noted for its 
variety of religious denominations. In 
the United States, for a town of five hun- 
dred souls to have four churches of dif- 
ferent creeds is no uncommon thing, but 
in our province it most certainly was. 

The people were always bickering about 
religious matters, and " peace on earth, 
good will to men " was a meaningless 
phrase among them. And their fighting 
proclivities had descended to their chil- 
dren. There were no rougher, meaner 
boys and girls anywhere around for miles 
and miles. 

To this village belonged a hamlet and 
that hamlet I daily had to pass, in 
later years, on my way to and from 
school at Sneek, but it was always with 
fear and trepidation in my heart, es- 



118 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

pecially in the winter when there was 
snow on the ground. I dreaded the hard 
snowballs, often containing small pieces 
of brick. There were only a few children 
in this hamlet, but these few were fine 
specimens of those of the main village. 

A feature of our roads was the dog- 
cart. It was not really a cart, but a 
wagon, drawn by a dog, or perhaps by 
two, or four dogs, while the man usually 
sat on the side of the wagon, with his 
feet dangling down. This man was the 
village errand boy. Each village had at 
least one of these errand " boys." Some 
went to town every week day, others 
once or twice a week. They were express 
men as well. For each errand they did, 
and for each package they carried, they 
charged from three to ten cents, accord- 
ing to size. Some of these men were 
good to their dogs, others treated them 
cruelly and you could hear the beasts cry 
and yelp a mile away. Frisian people, 
though charitable, are no sentimentalists, 



THE WALKS WE TOOK 119 

and it was only in extreme cases that 
these men were arrested and condemned 
to serve a term in prison. 

On our walks, I always took a memo- 
randum book and a pencil along and 
wrote down everything we saw, even to 
such details as a water-rat which jumped 
into a ditch when he heard us. 

It had become my ambition to see all 
the world, everything there was to be 
seen, and I therefore thought the best 
thing I could do was to start with the 
surrounding villages and gradually fol- 
low this up with all the rest of the towns 
and villages of our province. There were 
hundreds of them. Did we not do the 
same thing in school with our geography 
lessons? We started with the school- 
house, next came the village, then the 
municipality, this was followed by our 
province, later came the whole country 
of Netherland, next Europe, and then, 
one by one, the other continents. 

One day, however, when thinking and 



120 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

thinking, I became appalled by the vast 
number of villages, towns, and cities there 
must be in the world. Could I ever see 
them all, even if I had lots of money and 
did not have to spend any time in mak- 
ing a living? It did seem rather hope- 
less. I feared it would take many lives 
instead of one short life of perhaps sixty 
or seventy years. 

While moodily pondering over this to 
me very serious problem, suddenly a 
light shone in upon me. Would all 
these places be worth seeing ? Were not 
many of the villages I had seen so much 
alike that I might have missed seeing 
some of them and yet have missed little ? 
I heaved a sigh of relief. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE KERMIS 

Our kermis or annual fair fell in the 
second week of October. It lasted three 
days, and this meant three days of 
vacation for us. It was, however, a 
badly appointed time. It was always 
cold, and usually stormy. The weather 
spoiled much of the fun. Several days 
before the kermis we lived in a continual 
excitement. 

Nearly all the kermis people, that is 
the people who owned the merry-go- 
rounds and the booths and stalls, lived 
in ships and they went from kermis to 
kermis, the whole long summer and fall. 
During the winter and spring they lived 
in town. 

From morning till night we watched 
the "opvaart" or canal. When, far in 
121 



122 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

the distance, we discovered a sail, we 
seriously discussed the problem whether 
it might be a booth-ship or not. When 
we had decided that it must be a booth- 
ship or perhaps the merry-go-round- 
ship, and it was not too close to school- 
time, off we went, to meet it. To nearly 
every one of these ships we gave a hearty 
welcome and an escort to the village. 

On the day before the kermis, early 
in the morning, at recess and at noon, 
we helped to erect the structures, that 
is to say, we carried the boards and other 
parts from the ship. The following after- 
noon the fun started. 

We rode on the gaily decorated merry- 
go-rounds. Never in this country have 
I seen them so gay with colors, draperies, 
and fringes. 

At times we walked along the booths 
in which were sold toys, " oliekoeken," 
which resemble doughnuts somewhat 
except that they have no holes in them, 
and "poffertjes," which are flat and much 




Merry-go-round at Kermis in the Village of Deersum. 
Some of the men are dressed in women's clothes. 





If 


¥ 


"'"ftifli^t: ft 


iJ \ 





Skating-race of couples at village of Deersum, 
It is thawing, and there are few present. 



THE KERMIS 123 

more delicate. The oliekoeken are round. 
There were also waffles, sweets and kermis- 
koeken. A kermiskoek was a flat, ob- 
long, cookie-like cake, and it had written 
on it with white frosting: Ter kermis, voor 
vader; voor moeder; voor Jan ; voor Anna; 
voor Piet; voor Marie; or some other name. 
" Voor " means for. 

Then there were the organ grinders 
and street singers. The latter were chil- 
dren, and their nasal voices were a sore 
trial to sensitive ears. When I was quite 
little, a man with a Punch and Judy 
show used to come, too. In some stalls, 
over a hollowed place in a large block 
of wood, was placed a very long and thin 
piece of cake, about a foot wide, and who- 
ever could break this cake in two with a 
cleaver won the cake. 

The most important events of the 
kermis, for the grown-ups at least, were 
the races. On the first day, there usu- 
ally was a race of horses before the two- 
wheeled carriages called tilburies. The 



124 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

race was held on the highway by farmers 
and no gambling ever took place. No 
one even thought of it. 

On the second day young farmers and 
their wives or sweethearts or sisters com- 
peted in "ringryden." The couple, driv- 
ing in a tilbury, would try to obtain as 
many rings as possible while passing, in 
a row, a pole in which rings had been 
placed. 

On the third day young men either 
held a foot-race or a bicycle race. Some- 
times prizes were offered to the owners of 
the most prettily decorated bicycles. 

At other times young fellows would 
dress in women's clothes, and with a couple 
of baskets— such as are carried by women 
who sell bread, rolls, and cake for the 
bakers — dangling from a yoke on their 
shoulders, would hold foot-races, which 
were very funny and amusing. 

Sometimes men, and occasionally young 
women, would race, each pushing a 
wheelbarrow loaded with empty kegs. If 



THE KERMIS 125 

a keg rolled off, the racer would first 
have to stop, pick up the keg and place 
it back on the wheelbarrow before he 
was allowed to go on. Often, just before 
he had put one back in place, another 
would start to roll, or they would all roll 
off at the same time. It was against the 
rules to have them stand on end. 

And then there were still other games. 
Some years we children were remembered, 
too, and had our games. When it came 
to running, I was faster than any of the 
other girls of my class, owing to my long 
legs, undoubtedly. Usually, the grown- 
ups were so busy with their own pleasures 
that we were forgotten. 



CHAPTER XIII 

LEEUWAKDEN AND SNEEK 

Leeuwarden is the capital of Fries- 
land. It contains from 40,000 to 50,- 
000 inhabitants. It is a pretty and very 
neat little city. 

During the kermis, we used to go 
there with father and mother on Friday, 
market day. It was a two-hours' ride. 
Father always let his horses trot leisurely. 
At present, my parents, having retired 
from farming, are living there in one of 
its quiet, peaceful streets. 

Leeuwarden used to be a walled city. 
Most of the wall has been levelled and 
changed into pretty lanes. Near a cer- 
tain spot of the old wall at Leeuwarden, 
overlooking the moat, still stands a mass- 
ive leaning tower, dated from before the 
twelfth or thirteenth century, when the 
126 



LEEUWARDEN AND SNEEK 127 

waves of the sea washed as far as the 
town, although at present it is several 
miles inland. This tower, then, did 
service as a lighthouse. 

Once we entered the old tower and 
climbed up its many stone stairs, grown 
slippery and worn by the use of ages. 
On our way to the top we passed the old 
bell. This bell is very large and heavy 
and when it rings the deep tones shake 
the whole structure. In fact, its ringing 
had become dangerous, and its melodious 
voice was heard only on unusual occasions, 
far and wide over the town and the sur- 
rounding country. 

When we had reached the flat top of 
the erstwhile lighthouse, father, mother, 
one of my sisters, and my younger brother 
and I had a beautiful view over the whole 
town, and many villages, farmhouses, 
meadows dotted with cattle, shaded roads, 
and trains that seemed like slow, creep- 
ing animals. In a country where there 
are no hills and no " sky-scrapers," the 



128 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

opportunity of getting such a view is very 
much appreciated. 

Sneek was our nearest town. It con- 
tained 11,000 or 12,000 inhabitants, and 
had also been a walled city. Little of 
its old wall was left. We often visited 
Sneek and bought things in its stores. 
Like all Dutch towns, it has a large 
market-place, which stands near the 
" gymnasium " or secondary school, and 
near the Groote Kerk or Big Church. 

On Tuesdays I often saw hundreds of 
fine, black and white cows standing 
there in rows. Cattle merchants in long 
blue blouses walked among and behind 
them, and also farmers in wooden shoes 
and with caps on. They all did a lot of 
loud talking, and every once in a while 
one could hear a merchant and a farmer 
talk as if angry, and the one slap hard 
on the palm of the other's outstretched 
hand. Were they trying to hurt each 
other? No, they were only driving a 
hard bargain. When the cow had 




Flower-market at Sneek. 




Market-day at Leeuwarden. 
In the centre is the old weigh-house. 



LEEUWARDEN AND SNEEK 129 

changed ownership, one could see the 
two men, as the very best of friends, 
enter an inn. There the farmer would 
receive the price in hard cash. On 
many occasions one farmer sold to an- 
other instead of to a merchant. 

Besides cattle, there were pens with 
pigs, hogs, and sheep. They made an 
awful noise with their squealing and 
bleating, and I often wondered whether 
the boys in the "gymnasium" could hear 
their teachers speak. 

In the center of the town is the weigh- 
house, where one could see beneath an 
immense roof or awning butter in many 
barrels containing eighty Dutch pounds, 
or forty kilograms, each, and cheeses 
stacked in heaps. 

Most of the cheeses were large, flat at 
the top and bottom, and round at the 
sides. Many of these contained clover 
seeds, and others had anise seeds. But 
there were also Edam cheeses, almost per- 
fect balls. Some were colored red with 



130 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

aniline dye, others were yellow and pol- 
ished with oil. 

Edam is a little town in North Holland, 
where first these cheeses were made. At 
another part of town, in the middle of the 
streets, on market days, one could see a row 
of Jewish women squatted on the ground 
with in front of them, on a piece of cloth, 
a supply of notions, dishes, and other 
wares that they sold. Among them were 
also a few men merchants, while some 
Jewesses were lucky enough to possess 
booths and stalls. 

Sometimes, one of my chums, whose 
grandmother and uncles and aunts lived 
in Sneek, and I went to visit her rela- 
tives. 

On one such an occasion we accom- 
panied the maid to a little house where 
for a couple of cents she bought a kettle- 
ful of boiling water, and a glowing 
hard turf. You wonder why? It was 
tea-time in the afternoon. The fire was 
out, and it would take quite a while to 



LEEUWARDEN AND SNEEK 131 

start a new one and boil water. Gas was 
used for lighting purposes, but at that 
time had not come to be used for heat- 
ing. It was therefore quicker just to buy 
a kettle of boiling water and a hot coal 
on which to keep it boiling. 

Sneek was also known for its many 
"oude jonge juffrouwen," or old maids. 
No other town in Friesland, in propor- 
tion, had so many. 

And then there were the chimes. These 
were beautiful. They sounded each hour, 
each half hour, each quarter and each 
five minutes of. At the full hour, they 
played popular melodies with a great 
many bells. The Dutch are very fond 
of chimes and have them in the church- 
towers of many towns. 



CHAPTER XIV 

DUTCH AND FEISIAN 

If Dutch were not so dreadfully gut- 
tural, it would be a euphonious language. 
It has a very rich vocabulary and four 
sounds that the English language does 
not have. The u or uu, which sounds 
like the u in French, the ui, the eu, the 
ei and the ij or y. The ei and ij or y are 
so similar that most Dutch people make 
no distinction. They sound more like 
the i in white than like any other letter 
in the English alphabet. 

Many Americans seem to think that 
Dutch is the same as German. Many a 
time I have read broken English sup- 
posed to be spoken by Hollanders, and it 
was almost invariably the broken Eng- 
lish of a German. The words mit, der, 
und, schnaps are German. Their Dutch 
equivalents are met, de, en, jenever. 
132 



DUTCH AND FRISIAN 133 

And so it is with the names. There are 
Dutch boys called Hans, but they are very 
few. The name is really German. So is 
Gretchen ; the Dutch name for it is Grietje- 
or Margareta. Some of the most popular 
Dutch names for boys are : Jan, Piet or 
Pieter, Dirk, Klaas, Karel (not Carl), 
Frits (not Fritz), Hein or Hendrik (not 
Heinie), Willem and Joost. 

The Frisian language, spoken by the 
people of the villages and farms of Fries- 
land — in the towns a queer Dutch dialect 
is spoken — is very much different from 
the Dutch. It is somewhat related to the 
English, as are also the characteristics and 
the tall stature of the people. 

Some words, such as green, are identic- 
ally the same ; only, the Frisian adds to 
the sound " ee " something like a short 
and quickly uttered "u." Leeuwarden 
and Sneek are Dutch names, as we learned 
them at school. Their Frisian equivalents 
are Ljowt (pronounce the j as y in young) 
and Snits, 



134 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

While the Dutch pronounce the r al- 
ways sharp, the Frisian, before another 
consonant, pronounces it like the Eng- 
lish in a similar position, that is, very 
faintly. Cheese in Frisian sounds like 
tseese. Many other words, like butter, 
bread, church, field, meadow, churn, 
house, cow, sheep, grass, grazing, stall, 
sound in Frisian very similar. 

The Frisians are very proud of their 
language. They have their own maga- 
zines and their own writers and poets 
whom they esteem highly. The poems 
are simple, and naturally, celebrate their 
green meadows, their farms and their out- 
door life. The Frisian old-national song 
is beautiful, both as to melody and words, 
and conveys much more force and strength 
than the Dutch national song. 

Many villages have their amateur the- 
atrical clubs, and the village maidens and 
swains, the farmers' sons and daughters, 
give a couple of performances each winter. 
Some of the plays are serious, others sad, 



DUTCH AND FRISIAN 135 

but the comical ones, depicting some of 
their own ridiculous customs, and the ig- 
norance and stupidity of isolated stay-be- 
hinds, are the best and are best acted. 
They are very refreshing indeed and 
would make you roar with laughter if 
you could understand them. Many a 
long winter evening, father used to read 
aloud to us some of these old plays and 
stories. 

The Frisian people are very proud, very 
independent and very stubborn. Yet they 
are progressive. They have a horror of 
sentimentality and a show of affection. 
Parents never even kiss their children 
after they have grown beyond the baby 
stage. The Frisian motto of the Middle 
Ages was : " Frisia non cantat," which is 
Latin for " Friesland does not sing." 
They believed singing to be an exhibition 
of sentimentality, a weakness. Centuries 
later, however, nearly every village and 
town had its singing society, and so 
had we. 



CHAPTER XV 

OUB OANAL-BOATS 

A number of Dutoh people Live in small 
ships on the numerous canals. One oan 
see the skipper stand at the tiller, smok- 
ing his pipe ; his son or hired man attend 

to the sails and his wife wash the olothes 

or cook the dinner on deok while the 

ohildren axo playing around her, care- 
fully avoiding the flower-pots. And in 
the rigging, between the drying olothes, 
sings the canary in his oage. Everybody 
looks happy and the ship, olean as a pin, 
gleams in the sunshine. 

If the wind is against them, tho whole 
family pulls the ship, one behind the 
other; the wife is usually the Leader, 
having a loop pass over her ohest, and 
while straining forward, she pants from 
exertion. Only the skipper himself is on 
L86 



OUR CANAL-BOATS 137 

board, sitting at the tiller and calmly 
smoking his pipe. Most of the skippers 
go to the peat fields where they buy sup- 
plies of turf, load these into the holds of 
their ships, and sail back to their home 
villages where they sell the turf. They 
make a good living. 

Our little village counted among its 
inhabitants two turf skippers. One of 
them, during the winter, lived in a house 
he owned and his family was therefore 
as comfortable as any ; the other, less 
fortunate, had the hull of the small ves- 
sel — which, by the way, had a carrying 
capacity of only twenty-six tons — changed 
into a room, and the deck raised a couple 
of feet, so that one could stand up in it. 

Once the youngest girl took me into 
this hull-room. It was quite cozy in- 
side. The walls were like those of any 
entirely wainscoted and painted room. 
A heating stove kept it at an agreeable 
temperature while the snow came whirl- 
ing down outside. 



138 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

There was plenty of room for a table 
and several chairs ; a rug covered the 
floor, lace curtains hung before the tiny 
windows, and the family seemed happy 
and contented. Their summer apartment, 
the cabin, was being used as a kitchen. 

I wish you could see the cabin of the 
average turf ship. A whole family, con- 
sisting of father, mother, several chil- 
dren and the hired man, or perhaps two 
or three grown sons and daughters, have 
to live in it. It is so tiny that it makes 
you think of a doll's house. 

You board the ship on an ordinary 
plank, so you have to watch your feet. 
But before doing so, if you wear wooden 
shoes, you will have to shake them off and 
leave them on the shore ; if it rains or 
snows, you lay them on their sides so that 
they will not get wet inside. You walk 
over the shining deck to a square hole, a 
distance of a few steps. If the weather 
is raw, this hole is partly or entirely 
covered. You lift up the cover, and 



OUR CANAL-BOATS 139 

leaning on your elbows and hands, you 
let your feet descend through the hole 
and strike the floor below. 

You are now in a room of which the 
dimensions are no more than five feet by 
five, and so low that grown-up folks can- 
not stand up straight. Opposite the en- 
trance, and in a recess in the wall, stands 
a very small cooking-stove, which is pol- 
ished to perfection, and so are its brass 
handles and ornaments and the cooking 
utensils. 

At each side of the stove, built into 
the hull, are shelves hidden from view 
by miniature doors. They contain the 
chinaware and the clothes of the family. 
The table takes in most of the space of 
the cabin, and on two sides of it stand 
two stools. Over the stove hangs, sus- 
pended from the ceiling, a pretty lamp 
with porcelain shade. 

The walls are painted a dark red and 
shine with brightness and so does the 
little window with the lace curtain. 



140 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

Here the family eat and drink. The 
wife does the washing on deck, and 
if the weather is favorable, and she has 
an extra stove, also the cooking. Bat 
just think of it, to live in such close 
quarters during the whole long winter 
when there is little work for them to do 
and there is much rough weather. Yet 
that is what many families have to do. 
As soon as part of the hull is cleared of 
turf, the available space is also used for 
living quarters, but nowhere have I seen 
it fixed up with boards and built into a 
veritable room as in the ship of the 
skipper I mentioned above. 

Where, you will ask, do they sleep? 
Some in holes or closets at the other end 
of the ship, and others opposite the cabin, 
just beneath the deck, the opening to the 
hole, which during the day is closed by a 
door, being in the entrance to the cabin. 
There they sleep in a space not higher 
than a couple of feet. 

All the canal ships had two blades or 



OUR CANAL-BOATS 141 

shields, one on each side in the center of 
the ship's length. These could be pulled 
up a little, and let down. They were 
often washed off and tarred, like the rest 
of the outside of the ship, and served it 
in the same capacity as the fins do a 
fish. 



CHAPTER XVI 

PLAYING IN THE SNOW 

Of the four seasons we liked the 
winter best, in spite of its many dreary 
days. We enjoyed throwing snowballs 
into the brick chimneys. Of course, 
mother strenuously objected to it. On 
one chimney, however, we were allowed 
to practise marksmanship, for underneath 
stood only the large iron pot in which 
food for the cows and pigs was cooked, 
at the end of the largest cow-barn. 

In the village, the boys frequently 
threw snowballs into the chimneys of the 
peaceful villagers. One couple was the 
especial object of their mischief. The 
woman was very cranky, had no chil- 
dren, and therefore could not under- 
stand that the normal child cannot 
behave like an adult. 
142 



PLAYING IN TEE SNOW L48 

One of the boys, Jouko by name, hap- 
pened to land ii snowball through her 
ohimney into an unoovered pot with por- 
ridge. Tlio woman was very angry. In 
front of her door, in the alley, stood her 
husband, sawing wood. Immediately, 
with the saw in his hands, ho started to 
run after Jouke. And the chase was kept 
up for a long time, through the streets 
and alloys, over and through hedges and 
fences, through gardens and back yards, 
over snow-laden bushes and around trees. 

In his flight, Jouko lost his wooden 
shoes and he ran in his socks, but he es- 
caped, and tho irate man returned home, 
muttering and scolding and all out of 
breath, doubly angry because he had failed 
to wreak vengeance on tho boy. 

A few of tho boys — the bigger ones — 
were vory far from chivalrous, as boys 
should be. They not only snowballed 
the girls, but they often would put a 
small piece of brick within the ball, wot 
it and let it froeze. With these danger- 



144 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

ous missiles they bombarded our heads, 
shoulders, and backs. When our school- 
master died, and a young man took his 
place, we had more peace, for any boy 
who hurt a girl was punished by him, 
and he ruled us in the streets as well as 
in school. 



CHAPTER XVII 

ON SKATES 

Our winters were not nearly so cold as 
are those of the Eastern United States. 
Some years there is very little oppor- 
tunity to skate, or none at all, in other 
years about two or three weeks altogether, 
but when I was from twelve to fifteen 
years old, we had three unusually cold 
winters in succession. During the first 
we could skate for sixteen weeks. Every 
canal, every lake was frozen over. 

One could go anywhere on skates, even 
cross the Zuider Zee. Such a long stretch 
of cold weather, however, may happen only 
once in a century. Yet the thermometer 
seldom pointed below twelve degrees, 
Celcius, which is ten degrees above zero, 
Fahrenheit. 

145 



146 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

During every winter when the ice was 
strong, every afternoon all children were 
permitted to go home at two o'clock ; but 
when there was any doubt about its being 
strong, only those who brought a note 
from their parents were allowed to go. 

Don't imagine that we skated on 
wooden shoes. Sometimes, if we stayed 
close to the house, we did tie the skates 
onto our socks, but at all other times we 
first put on leather shoes. Our skates 
were flat pieces of wood, painted yellow, 
with iron runners underneath them, and 
like a swan's neck, turning up gracefully. 
We tied them on with leather strips or 
colored ribbons. 

When only three years old, we received 
our first pair of skates, and we learned 
the art while pushing a child's chair in 
front of us. This prevented us from fall- 
ing, and when we got tired we could sit 
down and rest. 

The large stretch of low meadows, 
about half a mile from the village, which 



ON SKATES 147 

meadows were inundated each winter, 
were the first to freeze over. There we 
skated, and with us were many young 
and middle-aged people and a few real 
old men and women. Business, then, 
was practically at a standstill. Farmers 
and farm-hands left the barns, mechanics 
the shops, tradesmen the small stores, 
and housewives with their daughters and 
maids stopped their eternal scrubbing and 
washing, knitting and mending. Also, 
the sport democratized all. Although 
otherwise there existed sharp lines of 
distinction between the different social 
ranks, now all mixed ; those who hired 
help with those who were hired, those 
who rode in carriages with those who 
had to walk ; women who wore golden 
helmets with others who had to be satis- 
fied with silver ones. 

The children and the men often played 
a certain game of tag on skates. 

As soon as it turned dark, in the even- 
ing, every one went home. There was no 



148 WEEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

moonlight skating, at least not on the low 
meadows. On the canals, where people 
often had to skate hours to reach their 
destination, it was different. Some came 
home late. 

Before the advent of the railways and 
the bicycle, the winter was the only time 
for many people in Friesland to visit their 
far-off friends and relatives. 

All along the canals, with short dis- 
tances between, stood white canvas booths, 
where men, women or big boys sold hot 
chocolate, cake, and cigars. Thus, one 
did not have to go hungry, and inside 
the booths were benches on which to rest. 
Three sides and usually the top were 
closed, while one side was open so as to 
let people go in and out 

Father often told us the story of a cer- 
tain man of his boyhood days. That 
man was supposed to be the champion 
skater of the country. One afternoon, as 
he came flying along a canal, he failed to 
see a booth until he was right in front of 



ON SKATES 149 

it. It was too late for him to stop, so he 
lifted up his legs and jumped clear over 
it. A couple of minutes later he re- 
turned, and seeing the woman who 
owned the booth pack her belongings 
together in the sleigh, all ready to go 
home, he asked her : 

" Vrouwtjej why in such a hurry ? Are 
you all sold out ? It's still early." 

She looked gloomy and troubled and 
answered : 

" No, I'm not sold out, but there is a 
limit to my courage. Just a minute ago 
I saw the devil himself fly over my 
booth." 

Practically every village and town had 
its skating club. These clubs gave a 
race every winter ; sometimes two races. 
These were for men, for women, for 
adult couples or for boys and girls be- 
tween twelve and sixteen. 

I'll describe to you one of these races 
held on the low meadows behind our 
village. At one o'clock the race started. 



150 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

The track was straight, about a hundred 
feet long, and roped off. Around it was 
a much wider track, called in Dutch the 
" bijbaan," which means side-track. This 
was also roped off, and for the members 
of the club or for spectators who had paid 
the entrance fee of twenty-five or fifty 
Dutch cents, Children paid ten cents. 
A couple of men, each with a broom, 
kept the race-track and the side-track 
clean. There were two chocolate-booths, 
stationed near the outer ropes of the side- 
track. 

In the morning, the racers had drawn 
lots, and according to their numbers, 
were to them their turn and their part- 
ners assigned. Only two raced at a time. 
They started at the beat of the drum, 
and raced twice or three times. The one 
who was defeated fell out. 

When all the couples had had their 
turn, the better skater of the first couple 
had to race against the better of the second 
couple, and the better of the third against 



ON SKATES 151 

the better of the fourth, and so on. The 
defeated ones of these couples again fell 
out, and the remaining ones were made 
up into new couples, again according to 
their numbers. 

The one who held out longest won the 
first prize, and the one who held out next, 
the second prize, and number three the 
third. Thus it often happened that the 
winners of the second and third prizes 
were not at all the second and third as to 
quickness. Luck in the drawing of the 
numbers had a great deal to do with 
that. 

In small villages, the first prize con- 
sisted usually of from twenty to thirty 
guilders, the second of from ten to fifteen 
and the third of two and a half. A 
guilder or gulden is forty cents in 
American money. The spectators on 
the side-track, which ran parallel with 
the race-track, on both sides, and around 
the start and the end, most times kept on 
skating while watching, to keep warm. 



152 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

All were happy, and the scene was 
given a touch of gayety by the flying of 
the^Dutch flag of red, white, and blue, and 
the orange pennant of the royal house. 

The Frisians compete for speed only, 
never for grace or agility. 

One day, a couple of my friends and I 
skated to Leeuwarden, Friesland's capital, 
to see a race for women. Leeuwarden 
had two ice clubs ; one had its race- track 
on the low lands just outside the town, 
and the other on the " gracht " or moat. 
The latter was by far the more interesting 
place. 

When we arrived there, we took off 
our skates and climbed the old city 
wall in the shadow of the Oldehove, 
the erstwhile lighthouse, of which I told 
you in a former chapter. From there 
we looked down on a gay scene indeed. 
Thousands of people were skating on 
the " bijbaan " or side-track. There was 
lively band music, and in the brisk breeze 
waved dozens of flags and pennants from 




View of moat or "gkacht" at Leeuwarden. 





















■ M ■ 






1 1 | _ , j 








„■-.. ^ hQ*,/'^; 






■.^J"-''-'-''Vo- •'■ 






'" j.- - ;i ^»/-,,- ■'; 










BHHb : " 


'/ ';; 'v'^ 



Scene in the Village of Poppingawier. 



ON SKA TEH 158 

the large oommittee tout., from the ohooo- 

lato-booths, and from polos. 

At out) ond Hlood two tiny pavilions, 
unci presently wo saw come out of thorn 
two rosy-cheeked young women, who had 
used thorn for dressing-rooms. Tho girls 
wore dark, knittod waists of hoavy wors- 
ted, and short knittod skirts, reaching to 
the knees, to match. Some young women 
had those of a very heavy woolen cloth. 
Their arms and their heads wore hare. 

They slowly approached tho line that 
marked the starting-place, placed one foot 
on it, looked grimly and with clenched 
tooth at each other, and at tho signal, 
rushed oil" There was nothing slow 
about thorn then. About a hundred 
young women, some of them from other 
provinces, had como to compote for the 
four big prizes olTored by the club. Tho 
race lasted two days, and tho victor was 
a seventeen-year-old skipper's daughter. 

The race ended, the band, followed by 
tho committee and the prize-winners, 



154 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

and a large crowd in the rear, marched 
through the quiet streets. The committee 
treated the four girls to a fine dinner, 
and later in the evening hundreds of city 
and country people attended the grand 
ball, which lasted until the early morn- 
ing hours. 

When couples skate, the man leads ; he 
places his left hand on his back and the 
woman puts her right hand into his and 
thus skates behind him. Of course, their 
strokes have to be of the same length and 
made simultaneously. Thus the women 
and girls are sheltered from the cold wind 
to a great extent. 

Schoolchildren, too, had their races, but 
I never won a first prize ; just the same, 
we all had a good time on such a day. 

When I was ten years old, my father 
took me to Harlingen to see the Zuider 
Zee. It was my first glimpse of the sea. 
Ever since I can remember I had a desire 
to see it, and now I was somewhat disap- 
pointed, for it looked dreary and forlorn 



ON SKATES 155 

and gloomy and we could not see very far 
because of the fog. The dyke on which 
we walked was more interesting. Father 
told me that it was built mostly of logs 
that had been shipped from Norway. In 
the harbor, and in the canals intersecting 
the town were the funniest ships I had 
ever imagined. Thus far I had seen only 
canal ships — mere toys — and these looked 
wonderfully big in comparison. They had 
queer stems ending in carved and painted 
figures of mermaids I 

One day, four of us girls and the hired 
man of the parents of one of us took a 
trip on skates to the eastern part of our 
province. There the soil is sandy and 
unproductive, and consequently the peo- 
ple are very poor. Many live principally 
on rye bread and potatoes. Because of 
the poverty, their minds have become 
blunted. They are coarse, rough, and 
often seek their solace in gin. 

We saw many huts about four feet high. 
They were made of mud, and grass grew 



156 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

on the flat roofs. They consisted of one 
room each and had one small window, 
and were dug a few feet down into the 
ground. Such a hut, such a pen, was the 
habitation of many of the poor wretches. 

Yet these people, in spite of their dis- 
advantages, in spite of many of them 
having to exist on dry boiled potatoes 
dipped in salt some winter months, have 
an inherent decency which prompts them 
to keep these huts clean and neat and 
cozy. 

At another time, our hired man asked 
my parents permission to take me out for 
a trip. As I was only a child, the per- 
mission was granted. "We skated many 
miles, and on our return trip darkness 
overtook us while we were crossing the 
Lake of Sneek. It was blowing hard and 
the snow was drifting. 

We skated at intervals through a few 
feet of snow and over a few feet of the 
shiniest of shiny ice. The path we had to 
follow was marked off with tree branches. 



ON SKATES 157 

It was so dark, however, that we could 
hardly see them. 

We lost our way. Once I fell, flat on 
my nose, into a deep pile of snow, my cap 
falling off and blowing away. The man 
had a hard time finding and chasing it. 
Finally we arrived at a village, far from 
our destination. However, it was there 
that we regained our bearings. 

At last, very tired, half-frozen, and 
hungry, we arrived at Sneek. There we 
entered an inn, appeased our appetite, 
warmed our hands and feet and rested. 
By the time we arrived home, it was late 
indeed. 

Often three or four of us girls would 
skate to different towns and villages, to 
watch a race or more often just to see the 
places. Sometimes as many boys went 
with us, and we skated in couples. We 
would leave home as early as nine or ten 
in the morning, and take several sand- 
wiches along. We would skate all day, 
see numerous towns and villages, have 



158 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

lots of fun, and at about five or six in the 
evening we'd be home again, very stiff 
and tired and happy. 

All along the canals, at regular inter- 
vals, men were stationed. They had 
been appointed by their municipalities, 
to the job of sweeping the ice with a 
heather broom and keeping it clean. 
While the skaters passed, they usually 
dropped a cent. Thus the sweepers made 
good wages. 

When the thaw had set in, it was great 
fun to cut the ice with an ax into 
squares of about three or four feet, and 
we would run along the width or even 
the length of a ditch, stepping from 
" schots," as we called such a block of 
ice, upon " schots." This had to be done 
quickly, for the moment you stepped on 
the schots, down it would go. Often the 
ice was so soft that an ax was not nec- 
essary for the making of schotsen. They 
would break off while we were running 
over them. In that case they were 



ON SKATES 159 

irregular and many of them were very 
small. This " schotsen loopen," or run- 
ning over the squares of ice, was a very 
dangerous amusement. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

1 . EG E N PS AN D A N EC DO V ES 

My father was a good story-teller and 
enjoyed very much telling as children of 

the amusing happenings he had heard 
of or seen when he was a child or young- 
man himself. The following is one of the 
stories he used to tell us. I shall call it 

Taught by a Dog 

The people of the town of Dokkum 
were supposed to be very stupid. Once 
upon a time a number of them were 
seated in an inn, in a semicircle around 
the fireplace. It was cold and many 
turfs had been heaped upon the hearth. 
The fire was bright and the room warm. 

At last it became too warm for the men. 
One of them placed a fresh supply of 
turfs on the burning ones, and this, at 
first, dimmed the glow considerably. 
160 



LEGENDS AND ANECDOTES 161 

After a while, however, when these, too, 
had caught fire, it became hotter than he- 
fore. Therefore, another man added a 
new supply, and again they felt comfort- 
able. Their comfort lasted hut a few 
minutes, though, for now it was getting 
hotter than ever. 

Again a bunch of turfs was thrown on 
the dames and once more they felt con- 
tented. But their happiness was short- 
lived. In a short while the heat had 
become almost unbearable. As they 
knew only one way of lessening it, 
which was the way they had been prac- 
tising, and as this appeared to give them 
but a few moments of respite, with an 
ever-increasing misery sure to follow, 
they were at their wits' end what to do. 

Finally one of the men, near whom a 
dog was lying, noticed that, as the heat 
was growing more intense, the animal 
was moving farther away from it. 

Suddenly a light went up in the man's 
befogged brain. He smiled knowingly. 



162 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

After pushing his chair back, he felt to 
his great relief that the heat no longer 
annoyed him, and the others followed his 
example. 

The Farmer and His Ponies 
Another story father told us is the 
following : When he was a child there 
lived near the same village an old farmer 
who had two ponies of which he was very 
proud and very fond. They drove him 
to the market at Sneek on Tuesdays and 
to Leeuwarden on Fridays. 

One day he heard rumors of people 
migrating to a far-off country called 
America, where one lived in plenty and 
luxury. To get there, he was told, one 
had to sail for weeks in a large ship across 
the sea. 

He thought if he were twenty years 
younger, he would have liked to go there, 
only he did not take a fancy to water. He 
had a talk with the old schoolmaster, the 
oracle of the village, to whom he broached 



LEGENDS AND ANECDOTES 163 

the idea of going to America in his car- 
riage drawn by the two ponies. 

" Why, man," said the teacher, " you 
could not do that, for you'd have to cross 
the Atlantic Ocean." 

" I'd drive around it," said the farmer. 

11 You couldn't do that either." 

"Why not?" 

" Well, you simply could not. It's 
too wide." 

" Huh," sneered the old man scorn- 
fully, " for my two ponies? " 

" Yes, my good man, the sea would be 
in your way, and besides, there are the 
mountains ; you couldn't cross them ; 
they reach as high as the skies." 

" I'd drive around them, too." 

" And impenetrable wildernesses and 
forbidden deserts." 

"And I'd drive around them. It 
might take me a long time, but I'd 
reach America all right with my two 
ponies." 

No matter what difficulties the school- 



164 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

master named, our old farmer firmly be- 
lieved that his two ponies were able to 
drive him around any and all of them. 

The German Charlatan 
When father was a young farmer, he 
had working for him for several years, 
during the hay harvest, an old German 
who was brighter, and better-educated 
than most men of his class at that time. 

He was also a queer sort of fellow. He 
would take a pin, mutter a prayer or 
whatever it was while rubbing his bare 
leg, and stick the pin into it. Now, this 
leg was of real flesh and blood and the 
pin was thick and two inches long. Yet 
it did not seem to hurt him at all and it 
never caused even as much as one drop 
of blood to flow. My father, who was 
very sceptical, watched him closely, but 
never could he understand how the man 
did it. 

One day father suggested : " Try it 
on me," but the man refused, saying : 



LEGENDS AND ANECDOTES 165 

" It is Saint Peter and Saint Paul who 
are doing this. You don't believe in 
them, and so they won't do it for you." 
And that was all father ever could get 
out of him, and until this day father has 
been unable to see through the old man's 
trickery. 

The following is a very old legend : 

The Woman of Stavoren 
Stavoren, now a dead, or rather, sleepy 
little town, was once one of the most 
famous Hansa cities. The Hansa or Han- 
seatic League was in the Middle Ages an 
association of the merchants of eighty- 
five towns in Northern Europe, for mutual 
safety and the protection of their trade. 

Stavoren lies on the Zuider Zee and its 
situation for trading with other countries 
was very favorable. It is said that its 
merchants grew so rich that they had 
the stoops in front of their houses made 
of gold. 



166 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

There lived a wealthy widow, whose 
ships sailed to every port and brought her 
treasures from all over the then known 
world. Her riches made her proud and 
arrogant, and she tried to outdo all the 
other merchants. 

One day she told one of her captains to 
go and procure the most precious article 
he could find. The captain pondered 
long and seriously. He sailed to differ- 
ent lands and at last decided upon loading 
his vessel with the finest wheat he had 
seen, in a city on the Baltic Sea. 

When, upon his return, his mistress 
asked him what he had brought home, 
he showed her the wheat with which the 
ship was filled. She looked at him with 
scorn and cried : " Is this the most precious 
thing you could find? Wheat? Do I have 
among my captains one so stupid as not 
to be able to find anything far more val- 
uable ? Go, throw it overboard, all of it, 
this minute ! " 

The captain looked at her in astonish- 



LEGENDS AND ANECDOTES 167 

ment. " This wheat is the best the 
world produces," he ventured to say. 
" If you do not care to keep it, let me 
give it to the poor. Many could be fed 
with it. To throw it into the sea might 
bring punishment on your head and re- 
duce you to poverty." (In Netherland, 
to throw away food, even a crust or a 
few crumbs, is considered one of the 
greatest sins.) 

At this the widow became very angry. 
She took a beautiful ring from her 
fingers, threw it into the sea and said : 
" As surely as I shall never see this ring 
again, so surely shall I never want." 
Then she once more commanded the cap- 
tain to do as she had bidden, and quail- 
ing before the anger of the powerful 
woman, he emptied the contents of the 
ship into the harbor. 

The following day the widow was to 
have fish for dinner. While she was 
ordering her servants about, one of the 
cooks came running towards her. He 



168 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

seemed very excited and had a large fish 
in his hands. Tremblingly he showed it 
to her, and what should she find in its 
stomach? Her ring. At the sight she 
paled. She thought of her words. That 
same day she received the news that one 
of her ships had been wrecked in a storm. 
In the days and weeks to come similar 
tidings reached her. 

In a few months every one of her ves- 
sels had been wrecked and their cargoes 
lost. She had to sell her beautiful house 
and costly furniture. And she died in 
poverty. At the spot where the wheat 
had been dumped into the harbor is now 
a shoal which is called Vrouwenzand, 
meaning woman's sand. On it grows a 
strange weed resembling wheat except 
that it never bears fruit. 

The Eccentric Farmer's Wife 
Now I must tell you about an eccentric 
farmer's wife who lived near our village. 
She was wealthy and very peculiar. Her 



LEGENDS AND ANECDOTES 169 

best room was cleaned and dusted every 
week, yet no one but herself and her 
favorite daughter were allowed to enter 
for fear of soiling it. One of her sons, at 
the age of twelve, told the schoolmaster 
that he had never even peeked into this 
room. 

Only once, on the occasion of a great 
celebration, was it used. Then actually 
guests were allowed to sit in it. She had 
six rooms besides the kitchen. One 
of them, during the winter, was used 
as a living-room and a few others did 
service as bedrooms. Yet, in the summer 
time, when the cows were in the meadows 
and their barns scrubbed and painted, 
she had a part of the main cow-barn, or a 
part of the "schuur" partitioned off and 
this she used as a living-room. 

Each of her daughters was presented 
with one new dress every year. But this 
new dress was not worn the first twelve 
months. No, indeed. For a whole sum- 
mer and an autumn and a winter and a 



170 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

spring it hung in a closet for the mother 
to look at when she felt like it. During 
the next year, the girl was permitted to 
wear it a few times. By the third year, 
when the seams and the hems had to be 
let out, she wore it on Sundays, and in 
the fourth year, to school. 

One day we saw this farmer's wife 
parade all around her house and yard, 
dressed up in all her finery. Was she 
going out ? No, she was not. Was she 
expecting visitors ? She would not have 
gone to such trouble for the Queen herself. 
No, she was airing her clothes. 



CHAPTER XIX 

BIRTHDAY PARTIES 

When it was anybody's birthday, the 
whole family was treated to an extra 
large piece of hard koek with the coffee 
at ten in the morning. In fact, the piece 
of koek was a fourth of a whole koek and 
a whole koek measured at least a yard. 
It was, however, thin and narrow. If a 
child, the one whose birthday it was had 
the piece of koek tied to his arm. 

My birthday being on the ninth of 
January, on the following Sunday I was 
usually allowed to have a party. Only 
girls were invited, about half a dozen, 
and they arrived early in the afternoon 
and stayed until eight or nine in the 
evening. 

Sometimes a couple of boys came to 

171 



172 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

fetch their sisters home and stayed for 
an hour or so. We drank first tea and 
ate cookies, and later had hot chocolate 
and three kinds of bread, buns, cookies, 
rusks, cheese, and candy. We looked at 
picture-books (children's books were not 
quite so plentiful then as they are now), 
pretty prints, sang school songs, gave 
riddles and solved them, and played va- 
rious games. 

At one time we decided to give a play in 
the barn. I had written a little sketch for 
two, which my girl friend and I studied 
and rehearsed. I also outlined a couple 
of other sketches for my younger brother, 
his chum who was of my age, and my- 
self. The two boys made the stage and 
placed a few rows of seats in front of it. 
We helped them some. We charged a 
couple of pennies admission, I believe, of 
the grown-ups. The children, who were 
the guests at my party, were free, of 
course. 

Finally, when all was ready, and 



BIB TED A Y PAB TIES 173 

the spectators had taken their seats, the 
curtain was raised and we started. At 
first all went well. Later came the act 
where my brother's chum, called Marten, 
had to creep between the floor of the barn 
and the planks of the stage. In his 
hands he held a cat. In the floor of the 
stage was a false door that the audience 
was not supposed to be able to see. I 
was dressed in my mother's hoop-skirt, 
taken down from the attic for the oc- 
casion, and over it hung a very wide 
petticoat mother had also worn when a 
young girl. In my hand I waved a staff. 
After much walking back and forth and 
making a " spiel," I went to the rear of 
the stage near the box. I lifted it, and 
holding it up to the audience for exami- 
nation, I proved to them that it was 
perfectly empty. 

Then I started to say : " Okus, pokus, 
knipzak," the three words of mystery of 
the Dutch jugglers. But before I could 
say " knipzak," I heard from beneath the 



174 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

planks the cry of a frightened boy, the 
screams of a still more frightened cat, and 
the next moment pussy darted upon the 
stage, unceremoniously crossed it as fast as 
she could, jumped among the audience 
who were glad to clear the way for her, 
and disappeared in the recesses of the 
barn. 

A few seconds later, Marten crawled 
from beneath the stage, his hands and 
face scratched and bleeding and he him- 
self muttering all sorts of imprecations 
against my favorite cat. 

We were very fond of play-acting. Yet 
a couple of vaudeville shows, seen at the 
time of the kermis at Leeuwarden, com- 
prised the whole extent of my acquaint- 
ance with real theatres. One winter, in 
the barn-like shop of a carpenter, this 
man's son, a mere boy of our age, was 
kind enough to build a stage for us ; I 
wrote a little play for four girls, and be- 
sides, from my book with illustrated songs 
to be delivered by children, we each 



BIB TED A Y BAB TIES 175 

learned a tune and the accompanying 
words. We dressed up in suitable clothes, 
charged a couple of cents admission and 
had a jolly time. 



CHAPTER XX 

MY DKEAMS OF THE FUTURE 

At the age of fourteen I quit the vil- 
lage school. My request that I might at- 
tend the normal school at Sneek with a 
view to becoming a teacher was not 
granted, the principal reason for the re- 
fusal being that the normal school hours 
were very irregular and often late at 
night, which would necessitate my stay- 
ing over night in Sneek. Besides, it was 
my parents' desire that I should follow in 
the footsteps of the many generations of 
farmers' daughters before me, and that I 
should do as other farmers' daughters of 
my village were doing, namely : learn to 
keep house, to milk cows, to make but- 
ter, to have a farmer boy for sweetheart 
and to become a farmer's wife. 

Now it happened that I would have 
176 



MY DREAMS OF THE FUTURE 111 

none of this. But I did not beg or nag 
or anything of the kind. I had dreams 
and ambitions. The dreams were mag- 
nificent, the ambitions gigantic. How I 
used to enjoy sitting in the grass at the 
water's edge, thinking of my quiet, un- 
changing surroundings, of the unevent- 
ful, monotonous existences of the people 
among whom I lived. 

The lovelier the day was, the sweeter 
the birds sang, the stronger I felt the 
draw and pull of the wonderful, big, 
beautiful world outside. Why should I 
live my life as my mother was living 
hers ? Up at four or half-past each morn- 
ing. All day making butter, cooking, 
cleaning, polishing, knitting, with few 
people to see and fewer books to read. 
Working, working, working, little respite, 
little recreation, no variety, and with for 
greatest pleasure the riding to town in the 
tilbury, at the side of the husband, the 
envy of the village women, who had to 
trudge on foot. 



178 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

And the mountains and forests and 
oceans would forever be unseen by me. 
Others might enjoy the works of beauty 
of nature, and the works of beauty of 
genius, but I was to content myself with 
a hopeless, endless, deadening longing 
only. Was I really ? Indeed I was not. 
Others had been able to fight their way 
from fettering surroundings and circum- 
stances, and so could I. 

At one time I decided to become an ex- 
plorer, like Stanley and Livingstone. I 
wanted to go to darkest Africa, to the 
jungles of India. Of course, I was only 
a child and had to grow up first. But, 
though I changed my plans occasionally, 
the mainspring remained fixed firmly 
and immutably ; I wanted to travel. As 
we were not wealthy, it would mean that 
I should have to make my living and the 
money to travel with at the same time. 
My parents and older sisters tried to dis- 
courage me again and again. They told 
me of the impossibility of my plans ; that, 



MY DREAMS OF THE FUTURE 179 

being a child, I could not understand yet 
what the difficulties were for a young 
woman roaming alone through the wicked 
world, but their advice did not in the least 
waver my resolution. 

Strange to say, often I did not seem to 
think of myself as a girl, but as a boy. 
For instance, I liked variety and a life of 
sameness seemed to me dreadful, and I 
wanted to get all out of life there was to 
be gotten out of it. So at one time I 
thought, when grown up I should try all 
the trades, be a carpenter, a blacksmith, 
a cooper, a sailor, a baker, etc., successively 
and each one for a short time only. 

I read biographies of great men and 
wanted to emulate them. My hero and 
example was always a man, never a 
woman, and this has been so with me all 
through life. Yet I was not a tomboy, 
due perhaps to my not being very robust. 
Neither did I regret my being a girl ; on 
the contrary, I was proud and glad of it, 
but I believed myself to be on a perfect 



180 WHEN I WAS A GIBL IN HOLLAND 

equality with boys and having the same 
rights. This was undoubtedly due to my 
great love for freedom. 

Yes, I did, once upon a time, have a 
heroine whom I took for example. She 
was the aunt of one of my chums. I 
had never had the pleasure of seeing the 
lady face to face, but I had seen several 
photographs of her and my little friend 
told stories of her, which, to my young 
mind, seemed wonderful. This aunt was 
a school-teacher in Java, Holland's most 
valuable colonial possession and one of 
the beauty-spots of the world. I made 
up my mind that I wanted to become a 
teacher or governess and laid my plans 
accordingly. 

After I left the village school, I re- 
ceived twice a week lessons in fancy- 
work from our woman-teacher. Besides, 
whenever I could snatch a few moments 
between my household duties I studied 
French, English, and German without a 
teacher. 



MY DREAMS OF THE FUTURE 181 

In July my father decided to have my 
sister Anna and me study English from 
a private teacher. When I was only ten 
years old, our oldest brother had gone to 
the United States. My sister, too, was 
anxious to go. Father said : " If you 
want to go, very well, but being a girl, 
you had better study English first, and 
be prepared." So it came that we two 
trudged five miles to Sneek, and five 
miles back, each Wednesday and Satur- 
day, to receive a two-hour lesson in Eng- 
lish from a very nice lady-teacher. 

On the twenty-fourth of August our 
parents celebrated their silver wedding 
anniversary. We had decorated our im- 
mense front-room with evergreens and 
flowers. Many relatives and friends 
came for dinner and in the evening 
nearly the whole village. Even the vast 
room could not contain them, so that the 
young people separated from the older 
ones and filled the living-room. Father 
and mother sat at the head of the long 



182 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

table in the front-room, in a bower of 
green decorated with silver. 

Everybody drank many cups of tea 
and coffee and "boerejongens," which are 
cooked raisins steeped in brandy and sea- 
soned with spices and sweetened with 
sugar. We ate rusks, several different 
kinds of bread and meat and cheese, and 
above all a great many large jelly-tarts, 
layer-cakes and cakes filled with raisins 
and currants. 

The young people danced in the barn, 
and the old folks talked and chattered. 
All sang and laughed, and some of the 
young guests added to the general hilar- 
ity by reciting comical monologues and 
dialogues. And the fun lasted till four 
o'clock in the morning. 

My sister and I studied English for 
about a year. The following August she 
went to the United States. I did not go 
with her because I was yet too young, 
and also because my heart was still set 
on India. 



MY DREAMS OF THE FUTURE 183 

About that time there was brought 
about a great change in the conducting 
of our dairy. We discontinued the mak- 
ing of butter and cheese and thenceforth 
sold our milk to one of the many cream- 
eries, that, bright and pretty, nestled 
among trees and were surrounded by 
flower-beds, in many villages and towns. 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE WEDDING 

For many generations, for hundreds 
of years, perhaps for more than a thou- 
sand years, it has been the custom for the 
young people of the villages, small towns, 
and farms of our province to get married 
in the month of May. Those who marry 
in other months are the exceptions to 
the rule. 

So it happened that the following 
spring my oldest sister married in the 
happy month of May. Two weeks be- 
fore the date set for the wedding, her 
flanc6 went to the town-hall and notified 
the magistrate of his intention to marry 
my sister, and from that time until after 
the wedding the two were called bride 

184 



THE WEDDING 185 

and groom. After the wedding they were 
husband and wife. 

The following Sunday, according to 
ancient custom, the policeman in front 
of the town-hall, with loud voice, called 
off their names, saying that they intended 
to get married, and he asked the good 
people of the village whether they had 
any objection. Of course, they had none. 
The second Sunday the policeman re- 
peated this. . 

In the meantime, on the first Sun- 
day, many people in our village and on 
the farms, in honor of the bride and 
groom, had the flag out, the Dutch 
red-white-and-blue. Even the windmills 
were adorned with flags. We had the 
big front-room and the living-room deco- 
rated with greens and flowers. 

Several of the groom's nearest relatives 
and some of our own came early in the 
morning for the whole day. In the after- 
noon and evening many invited friends 
came. We had tea all afternoon, " boere- 



186 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

jongens " and cookies at from about four 
o'clock until six, after that coffee and 
11 koek " and then again more " boere- 
jongens," with all sorts of cakes and 
tarts, big and small. 

During the night, coffee was made, and 
there were dishes with different kinds 
of bread, meat, cheese, and rusks, and 
those guests who were about to leave 
first partook of them. The tables were 
never empty. There was singing and 
dancing, games were played and some 
of the guests delivered comical recita- 
tions. The handles of the cups of the 
bride and groom had been decorated with 
ribbons, also the stems of their glasses. 

Every boy and man present smoked an 
old-fashioned Gouda clay pipe ; at least 
the first couple of hours ; afterwards it 
was no longer inconsistent with good 
form to smoke a cigar. The pipe of the 
groom was about a yard long — I mean 
the stem, the bowl being of the ordinary 
size — and it was all decorated with arti- 



THE WEDDING 187 

ficial flowers. He was very careful with 
it that he might prevent it from break- 
ing all through the days of merrymak- 
ing, and save it as a souvenir for the rest 
of his life. Such a pipe is used only 
during the wedding celebrations. 

As you know, the Dutch are extremely 
fond of smoking ; a man who does not 
smoke is considered effeminate by them. 
No young girl will accept the attentions 
of a young man who does not smoke or 
who turns sick in the effort. 

The following Sunday the groom's par- 
ents, who lived in another village, in- 
vited their relatives, the young man's 
friends, and also all of us. Father, 
mother, my brother, and we girls all 
went, and about the same sort of festivi- 
ties took place there as had been enjoyed 
at our house. 

But don't think that on the other days, 
the week-days, life was lived in its usual, 
quiet way. Far from it. Some days the 
groom had to spend at our home, for there 



188 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

were still more parties, as a number of 
friends had been unable to come on Sun- 
day, and therefore came during the week. 
At all these celebrations the bride wore a 
pretty, but colored dress, called the bride's 
dress. Of course, most of the guests 
brought or sent presents. 

The second Thursday was the wedding 
day. Now my sister donned her wedding 
gown, which was black. At about ten 
in the morning the bridal procession 
started for our town-hall, in a neigh- 
boring village belonging to the same 
"gemeente" or municipality. 

The bride and groom, seated in a til- 
bury and with their horse decorated with 
flowers and ribbons, led the procession. 
My parents, my brother and I in our 
carriage, followed ; then came the groom's 
parents and several other relatives in their 
vehicles. 

Soon after we entered the town-hall, the 
parents of both bride and groom had to 
sign a document in token of their consent 



THE WEDDING 189 

to the marriage. If the young people 
had been past thirty years of age, this 
would not have been necessary. Young 
men and young women in Netherland 
are not supposed to be able to choose 
wisely as long as they are under thirty. 
Not that they don't choose for themselves; 
they always do, but being in love they 
are likely to be blind and therefore are 
not permitted to take the most serious 
step in their lives without the consent 
of their parents. In all other respects 
young people became of age at twenty- 
three, at the time I was still at home. 
After the signing of the papers by the 
parents, our burgomaster performed the 
marriage ceremony, which was witnessed 
from the open doors by an inquisitive 
village crowd. Neither the ring nor the 
license was part of the ceremony. Both 
husband and wife wear a wedding ring ; 
not a plain band but a pretty ring with 
diamond or other stone, but these rings 
are not used in the ceremony. 



190 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

To marry secretly is impossible there, 
and it is just as impossible to deceive the 
magistrates as to one's age. Such things 
as elopement and bigamy are in the 
minds of the people relegated to the 
Middle Ages. One reads of them as one 
reads of tales of knights and the attack- 
ing and defending of castles ; they belong 
to the romantic past. 

After the ceremony, the whole pro- 
cession returned to our house. There a 
big dinner was awaiting us. The rest of 
the day was spent quietly and early in 
the evening the young couple went to 
their new home. 

In Netherland, weddings performed by 
preachers and priests would not be law- 
ful. Many do perform such ceremonies, 
but not until after the civil marriage has 
taken place, and they are called " benedic- 
tions " and not weddings. In the larger 
towns and cities, such benedictions often 
take place in church right after the wed- 
ding at the town-hall. In small towns 



THE WEDDING 191 

and villages this usually happens the fol- 
lowing Sunday, but many people, espe- 
cially where I lived, entirely dispensed 
with them. 



CHAPTER XXII 

HOW I CONTINUED MY STUDIES 

Our village church, which was the 
liberal branch of the Dutch Reformed 
Church, and similar to the American 
Unitarian, owned a little free library of 
fiction and more serious reading. Every 
Saturday evening, during the winter, the 
librarian, who was also the sexton, ex- 
changed the books for the men, women, 
and children who wished to make use 
of the library, in the Bible class room, 
where the books were kept. 

With true liberal spirit, the church 
granted the same privileges to the people 
of other faiths as to its own members. 
Every Saturday I used to get books for 
my aged grandmother as well as for other 
members of our family and myself. I 
remember how I enjoyed reading parts 
192 



HOW I CONTINUED MY STUDIES 193 

of the big volumes of the Dutch edition 
of " The Earth and Her Peoples." 

I was so fond of reading that quite fre- 
quently it happened that when my mother 
had told me to sweep, dust and polish the 
front-room, I would open a book and start 
reading "just for a minute." But I would 
keep on reading, forgetting all about the 
work, and two or three hours later mother 
would find me still reading and the work 
undone. Once, after dinner, I started to 
read instead of washing the dishes, and 
by four o'clock the dishes were still dirty. 

I also resumed my studies of French 
and German, without a teacher, and I took 
up a little Italian. I studied while I 
worked, and this is what did me more 
harm than anything else. It prevented 
the thorough digestion of my food, and I 
was a hearty eater in spite of the fact that 
my stomach was weak and had given me 
a good deal of trouble from infancy. 

I read mostly French, till ten o'clock 
at night. I often was so sleepy that I 



194 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

had to wet my eyes to keep them open 
and force my mind to work though it 
was too weary to comprehend the mean- 
ing of the words. I had always been a 
light sleeper, and when in bed it took me 
about an hour to get asleep. 

Yet the next morning at four I forced 
myself to wake up, and, half-frozen, would 
sit up in bed reading by the flickering 
light of a single candle. 

I contracted rheumatism in my arms 
and neuralgia in my chest. But I did 
not complain. Then one day my heart 
started to flutter, first part of the time it 
fluttered, later it fluttered all the time ; 
it never seemed to stop fluttering. Yet I 
did not complain. To drown the strange, 
irritating sensation I continually moved 
my toes while I was seated. I became 
very thin and pale, but as I did not com- 
plain, no one grew alarmed. 

One night I suddenly awoke. A loud, 
grating noise rasped through my chest 
while my heart pounded violently. 



HOW I CONTINUED MY STUDIES 195 

Frightened I jumped out of bed. But I 
did not call any one. Gradually it sub- 
sided. The following night the same 
thing happened. After that, many, 
many nights I dreaded going to bed. 
Sleep had become possessed with horror 
to me. Fortunately, the sensation was 
never repeated in so strong a form. I 
concluded that I had heart disease. Now, 
I had often heard the village people say 
that heart disease was incurable. There- 
fore, why should I go to a doctor ? If I 
complained to my parents, they would 
undoubtedly put a stop to my reading, 
and that would never do ! 

By some strange reasoning I figured 
out that I would have only three more 
years to live. And those three years I 
was determined to enjoy, and to enjoy 
meant to read. I noticed, however, that 
I could no longer study as easily and 
quickly as I used to. And to think 
that people had told me that pale, 
thin children are always brighter and 



196 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

quicker in their studies than healthy 
children ! Oh, the crime of ignorance ! 
It was my nervous condition that was at 
fault ; it made concentration very difficult. 
I had become morose and irritable. The 
only pleasures I still enjoyed were skating 
and dancing, and these had become very 
trying to my weakened body. 

Yet I hungered for pleasures. I 
longed to go to theatres and concerts, 
the opportunities for which were lacking. 
The simple pleasures of farmers and vil- 
lagers, such as parties, visits, going to 
town, the kermis, had lost all attraction 
and interest for me. The company of my 
former playmates now bored me. The 
books I had read, my ambitions, my 
dreams had estranged me from them. 
Nearly all their thoughts and their talk 
centered around finery and boys. There 
were very few points of common interest 
left between us. Also, my strong sense 
of justice and love for freedom rebelled 
against the domination of woman by man. 



HOW I CONTINUED MY STUDIES 197 

Once, when I was taking a walk on a 
Sunday afternoon with two or three other 
farmers' daughters, one of them remarked 
casually : 

"My father and the boys often play 
cards these long winter evenings after 
the cows have been fed and milked, but 
mother and we girls never play, for, as 
father says, we can always find something 
to do." 

The way she said this proved that she 
entirely agreed with her father. And 
just because her mother and the girls 
were ingenious enough to be able al- 
ways to find socks and stockings to darn, 
coats and trousers and skirts and dresses 
to mend, or crocheting and knitting to 
do, recreation was not for them. I, how- 
ever, believed it to be best not to speak 
my thoughts. 

When I was seventeen, I passed the 
entrance examination to the second grade 
of the " Hooger Burger School " at Sneek 
for the studies of French, German and 



198 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

Dutch literature. This meant that I had 
a knowledge of French equal to that 
gained in two school years, and a knowl- 
edge of German equal to that gained in 
one school year, and a fair knowledge of 
Dutch grammar and literature. 

A Hooger Burger School is a secondary 
school with either three or five grades. 
Ours had five. The studies taught are 
Dutch, French, German, English, mathe- 
matics, history, geography, chemistry, 
physics, bookkeeping, drawing and a few, 
others. 

Most of the boys attending take all 
the studies, which, in the end, entitles 
them to a diploma. Many of them, later, 
enter commercial life, others go to the 
Polytechnical School at Delft, again others 
enter the Navigation School or the Marine 
Engineering School. Some obtain posi- 
tions in the post-offices and again others 
enter the school for veterinary surgeons. 

Most of the girls attending the Hooger 
Burger School take up part of the cur- 



HOW I CONTINUED MY STUDIES 199 

riculum. Some are normal school stu- 
dents who some day hope to become 
teachers. 

Opposite our Higher Burger School, 
with the canal between, stood the " Gym- 
nasium " or classical secondary school. 
There Dutch, French, German, English, 
Latin, Greek, and to some also Hebrew, 
were taught, besides many other studies ; 
and every one of these was compulsory. 
Few girls attended the school. The boys 
were too busy to have debating, dramatic, 
or other clubs. Their studying meant 
work, hard work. After six years of 
grind, they, and also a few of the girls, 
went to the Universities to study medi- 
cine and surgery, theology, law, higher 
mathematics, or science. 

Well, six days a week I walked ten 
miles to school and back, while each day 
I had from one to three hours' instruc- 
tion. 

One day, when on my way, I stopped 
and leisurely returned home. I now told 



200 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

my father, for the first time, that my heart 
so pounded, that my body was so weary, 
that my muscles so twitched — I, in my 
ignorance called it the shocking of the 
arteries — that I could no longer go on. 
So father told me to see a doctor. The 
result of the visit was that from now on I 
walked each day two miles to a station, 
took the train to Sneek and each after- 
noon walked home the same distance 
from the station. I was allowed to con- 
tinue my studies. 

At the end of a year I passed the ex- 
amination to the third grade, but it was 
deemed advisable for me to leave school, 
as the condition of my health had but 
little improved. 

A few more years passed by. I spent 
a great deal of my time outdoors, and I 
never did any hard work. I could not 
give up the books altogether. I con- 
tinued to read English, German, and 
French. I studied algebra and Latin. 
With the study of Latin I was assisted 



HOW I CONTINUED MY STUDIES 201 

by a boy friend who attended the " Gym- 
nasium." My sister in America had been 
sending me the " Youth's Companion " 
and copies of the " Ladies' Home Jour- 
nal " and other magazines. She also sent 
me an illustrated History of the United 
States, Tennyson's " Idyls of the King," 
Whittier's Poems and an English-Latin 
dictionary. 

It was at this time of my life that I 
gave up the idea of going to India. I was 
told that it would be impossible for me 
ever to live in a tropical country. Any- 
way, my parents were very much op- 
posed to my going there. I was told that 
beautiful, unhealthy Java contained the 
grave of many a Dutchman lured to its 
shores by promised riches or adventure. 

In one of our daily papers each week I 
read an interesting article by a Dutch 
journalist in Paris, and I was now seized 
with an ambition to become a journalist. 
As such, I thought, I could see the world 
and make a living at the same time. I 



202 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

wrote a couple of short stories, which 
were published in a monthly comic maga- 
zine, and also a few lengthy anecdotes 
which I had translated from the English. 

My discontent grew steadily. My 
little world had become a great deal too 
small for me. The monotony of my life 
had become very oppressive. 

Finally, after many futile efforts, I 
found a suitable position, and from my 
savings was enabled to come to America. 
I met with much opposition from my 
parents, mainly because I was not strong. 

When the day arrived for me to go to 
Amsterdam, where I was to find employ- 
ment, my folks said they hoped I would 
be so seasick while crossing the Zuider 
Zee that I would be scared into refusing 
the position. Well, I was seasick, but it 
did not in the least frighten me. I en- 
joyed the visit to Amsterdam. It was 
the first time I had ever been in a really 
big city and on a street-car — and it was a 
horse-car at that — and I was twenty-one. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

CKOSSING THE OCEAN 

My desire to see more of the world, 
and thoroughly to familiarize myself 
with the English language, led me to 
leave Holland. 

I wanted to see Antwerp, and by ob- 
servation be able to compare one large 
city with another. After a short stay in 
Antwerp I took passage on the steamer 
Vaderland. 

Most of the passengers were Americans, 
especially those of the first cabin. I im- 
mediately took a liking to them. I liked 
the independence and democratic attitude 
of the American women, although some- 
times they shocked my Dutch sense of 
propriety very much, especially by their 
carelessness and wastefulness. 
203 



204 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

What puzzled me was that quite a 
number of first-class passengers spoke 
incorrect English, that is to say, they 
made grammatical errors. Why did 
they say " don't " instead of " does not," 
" will " when they should have said 
" shall/' " was" for " were," " I " for " me," 
and "me" for "I"? Dutch people of 
wealth and refinement make no such mis- 
takes in the grammar of their language. 

Another thing that puzzled me was that 
some first-class women passengers showed 
by the roughness of their hands that they 
had done menial work, and there were 
others who washed their handkerchiefs 
and other articles of clothing themselves 
and hung these in their staterooms to 
dry ; some even blackened their shoes 
themselves. In Holland, ladies who 
travel first-class don't wash clothes or 
blacken shoes. 

I had yet to learn that in America, 
especially in the West, much menial 
work is performed by women who, if 



GBOSSING THE OCEAN 205 

living in similar circumstances in Hol- 
land, would keep one or two servants. 
In Holland, their social standing would 
simply demand this, even if an insufficient 
income might make it necessary for them 
to do injustice to their appetites. 

I loved the ocean ; I loved it in its 
every mood. And I loved my independ- 
ence, and the sight of the New World I 

I stayed a few days in New York with 
friends, and one day we went rowing 
in Central Park. Miss V. R., who had 
often rowed on a lake near Rotterdam, 
her native city, was to handle the oars. 
Miss H. and I disclaimed any familiarity 
with them. But Dutch rowboats are dif- 
ferent from American rowboats and are 
rowed in a different way. Miss V. R. 
simply could not manage the boat. It 
was going forward when, according to 
her, it should go backward, and back- 
ward when it should go forward ; it went 
sideways when it should go straight, and 
it had a very unpleasant habit of getting 



206 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

into collision with other boats. And it 
threatened continually to topple over. 

Poor Miss V. R., crestfallen and 
ashamed, suggested that the stout and 
strong Miss H. take her place and do the 
rowing, but Miss H., who had been a 
stewardess on an Atlantic liner, flushed 
with anger, snapped : "For goodness' sake, 
sit still and don't try to upset the boat. 
Do you suppose that after having crossed 
the ocean each month for years, I want 
to get drowned in a little bit of water 
like this?" 

Surely, the lake would have been an 
ignoble grave for such an old salt. 

In the meantime a crowd was gath- 
ering on the opposite shore. Some of 
the young men shouted their advice to 
us, telling us how we should handle the 
oars. And Miss V. R. in the excitement 
forgot the little English she knew and 
shouted back in Dutch that she was do- 
ing the best she could. Finally, the 
boatman came to our rescue. 



CROSSING THE OCEAN 207 

We also went to Coney Island and 
watched the bathers. We were very 
much shocked at seeing women and also 
men in their bathing-suits walking on 
the beach ! In Holland one is driven in 
a coach drawn by horses into the surf 
and fetched back in the same manner. 
The bather never exposes herself to the 
public. I remember among these Coney 
Island bathers one particularly fat 
woman. How often we laughed after- 
wards at the recollection of her ! 

After enjoying the sights of New York, 
I took the train for Chicago, stopping at 
Niagara Falls for one of the happiest days 
in my life. It was in the latter part of 
November and the Falls had donned 
their winter costume. The effect of the 
sun shining on the frozen spray on the 
bending tree-branches was marvelous and 
bewildering. All day I walked around 
there, all alone. The show-place of East- 
ern United States was deserted. 

I reached Chicago on Thanksgiving 



208 WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN HOLLAND 

Day, and spent three weeks visiting un- 
cles, aunts, cousins, and old-time friends. 

On New Year's Eve I boarded the 
Santa Fe* train for San Francisco. In 
spite of my being car-sick, I enjoyed the 
trip immensely and especially the big, 
bleak desert, which held a peculiar fasci- 
nation for me. Four days later, precisely 
at six o'clock in the evening, I greeted 
my sister at the Ferry Building in San 
Francisco. I immediately took a great 
liking to this fair city and its climate. 

A few days after my arrival I was en- 
rolled as a pupil of a prominent business 
college. 

It has never been my ambition to ac- 
cumulate money or property, for which 
characteristic I have been much criti- 
cized by people to whom happiness 
means something widely different from 
what it means to me. Fortunately, their 
criticism has never done any harm, as I 
have not permitted it to interfere with 
my pursuit of what constitutes my par- 



GOING WEST 209 

ticular notion of happiness, to wit : the 
humble acquisition of a little knowledge 
and the enjoyment of the beautiful in 
nature and all lines of art. 

I have been in many places and 
localities and have found the greatest 
contentment where I can hear the 
thunder of the ocean's mighty waves, 
where the flowers always bloom, and 
where I can wander through mountains 
and hills and forests. That is why I 
love California. 



THE END 



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